Table View

What is a Table View?

A table view looks just like a table, and can be queried and transformed just like a table, except that it is actually not stored in hard memory. A table view is created by generating an overlaying “image” based on other tables or views, it is usually created to avoid repetitive future processing without duplicating the actual data in storage. For example, a user may have access to a very large data table, however she/he only needs a small filtered down portion of the original table with a few selective fields. In this case, she/he can create a view based on the filter and field selections, this way next time she needs to repeat her tasks, she can just focus on the view which is cleaner and faster to process.

More complex views can also be created joining multiple tables/views together and or having complicated calculated fields so the transformation steps do not need to be repeated in the future. A table view can be a live view or an extract view, the former always refreshes to the latest available source data, the latter will be “frozen” in time.