A view can be thought of as a stored query accessible as a virtual table. It can be used for retrieving data as well as updating or deleting rows. Rows updated or deleted in the view are updated or deleted in the table the view was created with. It should also be noted that as data in the original table changes, so does the data in the view as views are the way to look at parts of the original table.

The results of using a view are not permanently stored in the database. The data accessed through a view is constructed using standard T-SQL select command and can come from one-to-many different base tables or even other views.