Views - theory and practice in a multi-schema environment

I am working in an environment where many different applications share a single instance of Oracle. The different applications (in general) have separate schemas to hold their private data. There are some common (cross-organization) objects that are stored in a separate 'shared' schema. But often there is a need for some application to access the data (usually read-only but sometimes with update) owned by another application/schema. We make use of stored procedures and views for many of the interfaces in order maintain some level of documentation and control of dependencies.

What I would like to ask the group here is: What are the prevailing thoughts on how views should be used to support these interfaces between applications and where the view(s) should reside.

Should:

1. Views be used instead of direct or literal references to another schema's tables/objects?
2. Should views be created/stored in the schema that owns all/most of the component objects or should they be stored in the schema the most uses the view?
3. Should views be stored in a separate 'view schema' so that it is easy to see what sort of interfaces exists between applications.

Does anyone know of any published discussions on the use of views as an method of documenting and controlling interfaces?

Thanks,
Bob Received on Tue Nov 05 2002 - 23:19:24 CET