SQL: Better to connect to raw table and apply steps or filter/join with query?

Some general comments about SQL data access:

If your data is in a single table and is not large then querying a table will be faster than creating a view first and querying it for required data as it will avoid a step. If your data is not large and the columns your where clause are properly indexed then in most cases queries will be faster going directly against tables. Views should be used when you have a very large data set in a single table and you need to operate on small subset very frequently. In this case views will fetch the required data only once thus this will help minimize re-execution of search queries (on single table or a join). Bottom line, it is going to depend on your data and what your queries are so you are probably just going to have to test each approach and see what works for your situation.

Now, for the other perspective, there is a school of thought that in general you should simplify queries as much as possible by using views. The prudent use of views makes management of your application simpler and also helps you avoid repetition of query logic (joins, WHERE clauses, etc.). However, views can be ill-suited for a particular query and thus lead to poor performance as they might lead to unnecessary operations for particular queries.