Views and Simplification
I've been getting lots of questions on views lately. Must be something in the water. Because SQL Server allows you to treat a view as if it was a table, lots of people pretty much assume that it is a table since they get to treat it that way. The thing is, a view is not a table. It's a query. Let's explore this just a little bit. Here's a relatively straight forward view: [crayon-5a6d5f15cd34c210867431/] I can query this view like this: [crayon-5a6d5f15cd35b731529849/] The resulting execution plan looks like this: You don't even need to expand it for what I'm about to show. If we modify the query against our view as follows: Again, you can expand these, but you don't need to. Notice, the first plan had four tables…