How virtual views are not stored on database

Question

AS we know major difference between view and materialized view is- views are not stored on database and materialized views are stored physically on database. But it will give output in below example.

eg I have base table emp having 5 fields and I created v_emp view based on this table with only 3 required fields. and I run below query it gives correct output

desc v_emp;

My question is: if views are not stored anywhere on database from where it fetches data.

Note: I am using Oracle database

Answer 1

AFAIK, view is nothing but stored/saved query. So it's doesn't store any data and every time you run the view saying select * from v_emp behind the scene it run the underline select query saying select fld1, fld2, fld3 from employee;

Answer 2

Views ARE stored in the database. There are two main components of a view:

1) The definitions of the view... as in the select statement(for both types of views).

2) The physical storage of actual rows in the database (materialized views only).