View Updating and Relational Theory: Solving the View Update Problem

Views are virtual tables. That means they should be updatable, just as "real" or base tables are. In fact, view updatability isn’t just desirable, it’s crucial, for practical reasons as well as theoretical ones. But view updating has always been a controversial topic. Ever since the relational model first appeared, there has been widespread skepticism as to whether (in general) view updating is even possible.

In stark contrast to this conventional wisdom, this book shows how views, just like...