Stop Writing Queries When You Need To Be Writing Views (With Examples)

Reduce the complexity and execution time of your queries with views for cleaner data and happier stakeholders.

Zach Quinn

— 6 min read
Share
A viewfinder overlooking an autmn lake.
A real-life viewfinder. Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash.

Views 101

Before your eyes gloss over and your brain goes into low-power mode thinking this is a basic overview (pun unintended, but welcomed) of views, think again.

My intention is to dwell less on what a view is (because that’s a pretty simple explanation) and focus, instead, on:

  • What views are used for
  • How to optimize data processing with views
  • How to use views with a data visualization tool

So maybe it’s more accurate to call this views 102.

Nonetheless, I’ll assume that you know a view is the result of a stored query that “refreshes” itself in real time. There are details and caveats to that definition that we’ll explore, but that’s the essence of a view’s definition and purpose.

Views are powerful tools that, while associated with data analysis, are not the sole domain of data analysts. As a data engineer I create, utilize, update and materialize (we’ll get to that in a second) views daily.

If you take one thing away from this crash course in view development, remember this:

Views help simplify and streamline data sources by querying sometimes-complex tables for the important stuff (a purposefully ambiguous designation defined by an individual, team or organization)

However, unlike stored procedures and user defined functions, views aren’t considered “complex SQL” and really don’t have a lot of literature surrounding best use cases.

That’s about to change.

Build Your Pipeline To A Data Engineering Career

You’ve reached the limit of the public preview. The full version of this post includes the implementation details: The code, the edge cases, and the "why" behind the architecture.

When you join PipelineToDE, you get:

  • The DA → DE Pathway Course: A structured roadmap to bridge the gap between analysis and engineering.
  • Weekly Senior Deep Dives: Fresh, tactical insights on Python, Cloud (GCP/AWS), and modern orchestration delivered every week.
  • Production-Ready Blueprints: Access to 80+ protected stories and code repos from my time in the trenches as a Senior DE
  • The DE Job Board (Coming Soon): Exclusive access to a curated board of high-agency Data Engineering roles.

Read more