# SQL Views

> Learn how to create a SQL view, a virtual table built dynamically from the result of a SELECT query, and how to delete it later with DROP VIEW.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2020-04-04 | Topics: [Database](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/database/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/sql-views/

An interesting thing you can do with SQL is to create a **view**.

A view is like a table, except instead of being a real table, on its own, it is dynamically built by the result of a SELECT query.

Let's use the example we used in the joins lesson:

```sql
CREATE TABLE people (
  age INT NOT NULL,
  name CHAR(20) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY
);

CREATE TABLE cars (
  brand CHAR(20) NOT NULL,
  model CHAR(20) NOT NULL,
  owner CHAR(20) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY
);
```

We add some data:

```sql
INSERT INTO people VALUES (37, 'Flavio');
INSERT INTO people VALUES (8, 'Roger');
INSERT INTO cars VALUES ('Ford', 'Fiesta', 'Flavio');
INSERT INTO cars VALUES ('Ford', 'Mustang', 'Roger');
```

We can create a view that we call `car_age` that always contains the correlation between a car model and its owner's age:

```sql
CREATE VIEW car_age AS SELECT model, age AS owner_age FROM people JOIN cars ON people.name = cars.owner;
```

Here is the result we can inspect with `SELECT * FROM car_age`:

```
        model         | owner_age 
----------------------+-----------
 Fiesta               |        37
 Mustang              |         8
```

The view is persistent, and will look like a table in your database. You can delete a view using `DROP VIEW`:

```sql
DROP VIEW car_age
```