Why Indexed Views?
Views have been available throughout the history of Microsoft SQL Server. However, using views that return very large result sets can lead to poor performance, as the result set is not indexed and the entire result must be table scanned if the view is used in a join or a subquery of a T-SQL command. Additionally, products like Oracle have come out with the concept of a Materialized View that give an additional performance boost by being able to have indexes built on a view. So in the continuing evolution of the SQL Server product line and in response to Oracle?s Materialized View, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 has a new feature called the View Index. View Indexes give the product the capability to define an index on a view. Additionally, SQL Server View Indexes are dynamic in that changes to the data in the base tables are automatically reflected in the indexed view. Also the SQL Server query optimizer will try to use an indexed view even if the view is not referenced in the from clause of
