What is the purpose of PostgreSQL views?

[Anon]

Can you give an example of when I would use a view?

[Anon]

Let's say you were building a database to keep track of all your stuff. You have two (or more) tables, each of which have slightly different structure. For records/cds/tapes, you have artist, title, run time, label, and media format, but for books you have artist, title, pages, publisher, and format (hard cover versus soft cover versus ebook etc...)

By creating a single view of those tables called inventory, you can now have a generic way to pull up all the data in those different tables as though they were one.

Now, if you make minor changes to one table, all you have to do is recreate the view to reflect that properly to the code, and you don't have to change one line of PHP (or C, Java, Perl etc...) code.

[Anon]

The programmer's guide that comes with the postgresql tarball has an EXCELLENT bit on rules and views to explain the use of views.

I don't know if you found them, but in the doc directory from the postgresql-7.0.2.tar.gz file, has five excellent manuals:

admin.tar.gz -> Administrator's guide
postgres.tar.gz -> detailed spec
programmer.tar.gz -> programmer's guide
tutorial.tar.gz -> very nice beginner's guide to SQL the postgresql way
user.tar.gz -> every day user docs. I use these the most.