Stale View

If you have non-schema bound view in SQL Server and the underlying table was updated, you potentially can have a stale view. A quick way to demonstrate this:

Let say that you have the following table:

CREATE TABLE dbo.Contact (
    Id INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
    FirstName VARCHAR(10),
    LastName VARCHAR(10));
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.Contact VALUES ('John', 'Doe');
INSERT INTO dbo.Contact VALUES ('Jane', 'Doe');

Then, create a simple view against the newly created table:

CREATE VIEW dbo.vwContact
AS
    SELECT *
    FROM dbo.Contact
GO

If we run the following query:

SELECT Id, FirstName, LastName
FROM dbo.vwContact

We would get the expected result:

Now, what happen if we add a new column to the Contact table:

ALTER TABLE dbo.Contact
ADD Country VARCHAR(10) NULL;
GO

UPDATE dbo.Contact
SET Country = 'USA'
WHERE Id = 1;

If we run the following query against the vwContact view:

SELECT    Id, FirstName, LastName, Country
FROM    dbo.vwContact;

We would get the following error message:

Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 28

Invalid column name 'Country'.

That’s odd, it looks like the view does not recognize the newly added Country column.

Ok, let say that your company got a new contact, his name is Mr. Rhino Hippopotamus. Obviously, you will need to have a bigger last name column. So you decide to change the LastName column from varchar(10) to varchar(20).

ALTER TABLE dbo.Contact
ALTER COLUMN LastName VARCHAR(20);
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.Contact VALUES ('Rhino', 'Hippopotamus', 'USA');
GO

If you try to query the view using the following query (let’s forget about the Country column for now):

SELECT Id, FirstName, LastName
FROM dbo.vwContact;

That seems to work just fine. You get the expected result:

But, what happen if you try to run the same query from another server, using a linked server:

SELECT Id, FirstName, LastName
FROM ServerA.TestDB.dbo.vwContact;

Instead of getting the expected result, we got the following error:

Msg 7347, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

OLE DB provider 'SQLNCLI11' for linked server 'HSQL01' returned data that does not match expected data length for column '[ServerA].[TestDB].[dbo].[vwContact].LastName'. The (maximum) expected data length is 10, while the returned data length is 12.

If we check on the column property for the LastName column of vwContact view from the server that has the linked server to the original server, using the following query, we would notice that somehow, the LastName column is still listed as having 10 characters long:

USE [master];
GO

EXEC sp_columns_ex 'ServerA', 'vwContact', 'dbo', 'TestDB', 'LastName', NULL;

Solution

So how to address the issue that we are having with stale view. There are several ways:

We could drop and recreate the view. In the above example, we can run the following query:

IF (OBJECT_ID('dbo.vwContact') IS NOT NULL)
    DROP VIEW dbo.vwContact
GO

CREATE VIEW dbo.vwContact
AS
    SELECT *
    FROM dbo.Contact
GO

We could also run an alter view statement:

ALTER VIEW dbo.vwContact
AS
    SELECT *
    FROM dbo.Contact
GO

Alternatively, we could refresh the view using the following script:

EXEC sp_refreshview 'dbo.vwContact';