I came across a challenge that required creating a view from a very complex table with 30+ columns. The goal was to create a view almost mirroring the original table, excluding just one specific column. Creating views in SQL Server can be a powerful way to abstract complex queries, however, when dealing with tables containing a large number of columns, the classic method of manually listing each column that you want to include in the View can be very time-consuming and prone to errors.
Consider this example: Let’s say you have a table named ‘YourTable’, and you want to create a view excluding the column ‘ExcludedColumn’. The SQL statement would look like this:
CREATE VIEW YourView
AS
SELECT
Column1,
Column2,
Column3,
Column4,
…,
ColumnN
FROM YourTable;The SELECT statement would contain all the columns that we need for the View, and this approach works, but manually listing every column in the SELECT statement takes time, especially if you have many columns and want to exclude just one. Unfortunately, there is no built-in function in SQL Server to auto-generate the View script from the table automatically. A more convenient and efficient alternative is to generate the column list programmatically using dynamic SQL. Here’s an example of how to do it:
