I want to know what is the difference between a query and a view in terms of performance. And if a view is costly, what else besides a query could I do to improve performance?
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I want to know what is the difference between a query and a view in terms of performance. And if a view is costly, what else besides a query could I do to improve performance?
Views and ad-hoc queries, in the simple case, are nearly identical in terms of performance. So much so that when you program with a view, you should think of it as though the text of the view definition were being cut and pasted into your parent query.
HLGEM points out in his answer that certain editions of SQL Server allows you to ‘index’ views — in this case, behind the scenes SQL Server maintains the same structures that underlie a table, making an indexed view and a table very similar in terms of performance.
In SQL Server, though you can generally nest views fairly liberally without running into performance problems, it can make things more difficult to understand and debug.