Gert Drapers has posted a really good article today which you can read here. In it he suggests a best practice of always putting a view layer in between your database tables and the consumers of your data. He explains some scenarios where this technique can help.
It is clear from the scenarios that the use of views becomes really powerful to protect consuming applications from changes to your table schema. The use of views is a technique that I always try and preach on any project that I am on and this post from Gert is an excellent explanation of why.
Quite often I put posts up here to serve as personal bookmarks for when I might need stuff later and this is one of those times. Hopefully you'll click-through and be educated as well.
-Jamie