Postgres: virtual table

In Postgres and other SQL databases there is the concept of a virtual table, you will see this arise when referring to another concept in SQL, a view.

The reason views are referred to as a virtual table is because they actually contain the rows and columns that the view created. So if a view returns a number of columns like first_name, last_name, email, etc. it will exist in basically the same form as an actual database table.