Views

Bojan Petrovic
An executed CREATE VIEW SQL script showing data returned only for the SELECT statement in SSMS

CREATE VIEW SQL: Modifying views in SQL Server

March 5, 2020 by

In my previous article, we looked at how to use the CREATE VIEW SQL statement to create views. In this one, we are moving on and focusing on how to modify views. We will continue using examples on a sample database and data created in the first write-up so in order to follow along, head over and read the Creating views in SQL Server part before starting with this one.

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Bojan Petrovic
CREATE VIEW SQL script for creating a simple view

CREATE VIEW SQL: Creating views in SQL Server

January 23, 2020 by

Introduction

In this article, we are going to see how to use the CREATE VIEW SQL statement to create a view. This is the first article in a series that will be a programmatical approach of creating, altering and working with views using T-SQL. If you are a beginner and you don’t even know what a view is, don’t worry. We will kick off with a definition, and then move on to some basics like syntax, examples, use cases, etc.

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Timothy Smith

SQL Server – development practices with referenced views

July 24, 2018 by

We’ve recently had production failures because our developers changed an important reference. In this case, we had a view which several procedures and views referenced. A developer made a change to the referenced view by removing columns, which caused several procedures and a view that referenced it to fail. We’re considering whether we should stop this practice, or if there are other ways we can prevent changes to an object that’s being referenced by other objects (in our case, a view).

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Timothy Smith

Restricting and monitoring SQL Server data access with SQL views and stored procedures

May 17, 2018 by

This article explains data security for accessing sensitive data and restricts access in application using SQL Views and stored procedures.

We recently faced a leak of information for one of our employees that involved data which caused a conflict within our company, even if it was not personally identifiable information (PII data). When we investigated the issue, we uncovered that we need to organize data access for our teams and review who has access to what information. As of right now, all our users either have access to all tables directly or a subset of all our tables. What are some practices we can use in SQL Server to avoid giving direct table access to our users? Read more »

Prashanth Jayaram

Top 8 new (or enhanced) SQL Server 2017 DMVs and DMFs for DBAs

January 17, 2018 by

Dynamic management views (DMVs) and dynamic management functions (DMFs) are system views and system functions that return metadata of the system state. On querying the related system objects, database administrators can understand the internals of SQL Server. It allows us to monitor the performance of the SQL Server instance, and diagnose issues with it.

SQL Server 2017 ships with a number of new and enhanced dynamic management views and dynamic management functions that will help DBAs monitor the health and performance of SQL Server instances. A few existing DMV’s such as sys.dm_os_sys_info and sys.dm_db_file_space_usage have been enhanced. Some have also been newly built and available only for SQL Server 2017.

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Gerald Britton

Discovering database specific information using built-in functions and dynamic management views (DMVs)

May 15, 2017 by

Introduction

In the last two articles on dynamic management views in SQL Server, Discovering SQL server instance information using system views and Discovering more SQL Server information using the built-in dynamic management views (DMVs), we used DMVs to discover a fair bit of information about the SQL Server instance we’re connected to. In this article, we’ll begin diving in to database specifics. There is a lot of territory to cover! We’ll also use several of the built-in functions that come with SQL Server.

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Gerald Britton

Discovering more SQL Server information using the built-in dynamic management views (DMVs)

April 6, 2017 by

Introduction

This is the second article in a continuing series on the many system tables, views, procedures and functions available in SQL Server. In the first part of this series, Discovering SQL server instance information using system views, you learned how to discover many attributes of a SQL Server instance you have been given access to. In this part, we will continue the journey and see what else we can find.

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Gerald Britton

Discovering SQL server instance information using system views

February 28, 2017 by

Introduction

Out of the box, SQL Server comes with a substantial and – release by release – ever-growing set of system tables, views, stored procedures and functions. There’s a good chance you’ve never directly used more than a handful of them. That’s certainly the case with me!

This is the first article in a series designed to explore this world that lives just below the surface of our everyday interactions with SQL Server through the same objects we create to enable the applications we write and support.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Top 5 New SQL Server 2016 DMVs for DBAs

December 20, 2016 by

Since its initial release that was part of SQL Server 2005, Dynamic Management Views (DMV) changed – mostly for the better – the role of database administration (DBA) within SQL Server-based environments. They improved the efficiency of DBAs regarding database server monitoring, issue diagnoses, and subsequent performance optimisation. As a result of this positive reception, it has become customary that some of the highly anticipated items in every release of SQL Server includes discovering what new DMVs will be added. In this article I take you through my favourite top 5 DMVs to come out of SQL Server 2016.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server Partitioned Views

November 18, 2016 by

SQL Server table partitioning is a great feature that can be used to split large tables into multiple smaller tables, transparently. It allows you to store your data in many filegroups and keep the database files in different disk drives, with the ability to move the data in and out the partitioned tables easily. A common example for tables partitioning is archiving old data to slow disk drives and use the fast ones to store the frequently accessed data. Table partitioning improves query performance by excluding the partitions that are not needed in the result set. But table partitioning is available only in the Enterprise SQL Server Edition, which is not easy to upgrade to for most of small and medium companies due to its expensive license cost.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server indexed views

March 17, 2016 by

SQL Server Views are virtual tables that are used to retrieve a set of data from one or more tables. The view’s data is not stored in the database, but the real retrieval of data is from the source tables. When you call the view, the source table’s definition is substituted in the main query and the execution will be like reading from these tables directly.

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Eli Leiba

Creating an automatic View to an In-line table function conversion stored procedure

December 22, 2015 by

Introducing the Problem

We have a series of views in our organization’s application database. The views definitions are all static queries that consist of few or many condition clauses.

When the application first started with the initial data, the views operated normally, but after a while, after a period where data volume increased, the application’s performance time, through the views usage, degraded.

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Daniel Calbimonte

The SQL Server system views/tables/functions. Common questions and solutions to real life problems

December 25, 2014 by

Introduction

In this new article, we will talk about the system views/tables/functions and how to solve common questions using them.

The system views are views that contain internal information about a Database.

The master database for example contains information about the SQL Server itself, while the msdb database contain information about the SQL Server agent and each database has its own system views/tables.

In this article we will show how to get the list of tables, views, stored procedures, how to get a list of tables of all the databases, how to find a table in multiple datatabases, how to get the list of users, logins, mapped logins, how to detect a fragmentation in a table and more.

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