That said, SQL Server 2000 and above do have a feature called Indexed Views that can greatly improve performance, with a few caveats: Not every view can be made into an indexed view; they have to follow a specific set of guidelines, which (among other restrictions) means you can't include common query elements like COUNT, MIN, MAX, or TOP.

Feb 9, 2011 · Stop calling views from views or you will very shortly have a an unuseable system. We are completely redesigning a system like this because the application developers did this and the multi-million-dollar client is going to leave us unless performance improves and we can't improve it with this struture, so now a we face a complete redesign that ...

Feb 9, 2009 · For example, if you are front-ending with something like Microsoft Access you can definately gain performance for some complex queries by using a view. This is because Access does not always pull from the SQL server as we would like -- in some cases it would pull entire tables across then try to process locally from there! Not so if you use a view.

Stored Procedures (SPs) and SQL Views are different "beasts" as stated several times in this post. If we exclude some [typically minor, except for fringe cases] performance considerations associated with the caching of the query plan, the time associated with binding to a Stored Procedure and such, the two approaches are on the whole equivalent, performance-wise.

@NicholasDiPiazza, views are not pre-compiled. Views are generally just an encapsulation of a SQL statement but can be materialized by created an index on a view. Use caution with nested views as those are more difficult for SQL server to optimize. –

Feb 24, 2014 · The exception to the above is if the view is e.g. an indexed view (SQL Server, query has to use appropriate hints or you have to be using a high-level edition) or a materialized view (Oracle, not sure on the requirements) where the view isn't expanded out - but the results have already been computed beforehand and are being stored much like a ...

Dec 18, 2009 · One option would be to materialise the view (called 'indexed views' on SQL Server). However you may need to monitor update performance to check that it does not impose too much overhead. Also, outer joins in a materialised view may preclude real-time refresh; if you need this then you may have to re-implement the view as a denormalised table ...

@profimedica indexed views can be created for performance reasons (e.g. to store intermediary results like aggregates instead of calculating them at runtime). If a view is not materialized, it can be for a variety of reasons: DRY (common join or filter performed in many different queries), security, obfuscation, schema simplification.

Views are very helpful when refactoring databases. Views are not acceptable when you use views to call views which can result in horrible performance (at least in SQL Server). We almost lost a multimillion dollar client because someone chose to abstract the database that way and performance was horrendous and timeouts frequent.

May 9, 2016 · With schemabinding can improve performance in some cases. I couldn't recall all the details, but found an excellent blog post that goes through this in detail: With user defined functions that may need to update data. You might benefit from improved performance that would prevent an Eager Table Spool. SQL Server SCHEMABINDING