Question

Is there anything wrong with having one view reference another view? For example, say I have a
users table

CREATE TABLE `users` (
`id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`first_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`last_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
);

Then for the sake of argument a view that just shows all users

CREATE VIEW all_users AS SELECT * FROM users

And then a view that just returns their first_name and last_name

CREATE VIEW full_names AS SELECT first_name, last_name FROM all_users

Are there performance issue with basing one view off another? Let’s also pretend this is the simplest of examples and a real world scenario would be much more complex, but the same general concept of basing one view of another view.

Answer 1

It depends on the ALGORITHM used. TEMPTABLE can be pretty expensive while MERGE should be the same as using the table directly so no loss there.