Hi Demian,
the question is totally appropriate and currently our documentation team is working hard on filling the gaps here.
To answer your question:
Yes, SAP HANA provides two kinds of VIEW types - plain SQL views (created via CREATE VIEW) and so called column views (create via CREATE COLUMN VIEW).
The SQL view is the same as views are in all other DBMS. A SELECT statement encoded in a dictionary objects so that you can use it as if was a table on its own.
Whether or not the ROW or the COLUMN engines get involved in processing queries against this view does not depend on the view type. It can fully use row-store and column-store tables, just as you could do this with SQL.
The Column view on the other hand is a SAP HANA specific view type. It allows to create view-like structures for so called calculation scenarios. The SAP HANA modeler views (attribute/analytic/calculation view) are technically all defined as column views with the specific calculation scenario assigned to them.
You can check on this by reviewing the DDL statements for the generated runtime objects in schema _SYS_BIC.
- Lars
