The CREATE VIEW statement creates a new view (see Section 13.1.23, “CREATE VIEW Statement”). To alter the definition of a view or drop a view, use ALTER VIEW (see Section 13.1.11, “ALTER VIEW Statement”), or DROP VIEW (see Section 13.1.35, “DROP VIEW Statement”).

A view can be created from many kinds of SELECT statements. It can refer to base tables or other views. It can use joins, UNION, and subqueries. The SELECT need not even refer to any tables. The following example defines a view that selects two columns from another table, as well as an expression calculated from those columns:

mysql> CREATE TABLE t (qty INT, price INT);
mysql> INSERT INTO t VALUES(3, 50), (5, 60);
mysql> CREATE VIEW v AS SELECT qty, price, qty*price AS value FROM t;
mysql> SELECT * FROM v;
+------+-------+-------+
| qty  | price | value |
+------+-------+-------+
|    3 |    50 |   150 |
|    5 |    60 |   300 |
+------+-------+-------+
mysql> SELECT * FROM v WHERE qty = 5;
+------+-------+-------+
| qty  | price | value |
+------+-------+-------+
|    5 |    60 |   300 |
+------+-------+-------+