Malte - the specific application I am looking at is to allow me the ability to query the rdbms namespace to let me store uploaded csv files (or fixed-width and xml eventually) as tables in the underlying database. I have also been looking at the datasoup discussions and feel that there is no clean way to map from the OpenACS internal objects and datatypes into the underlying tables. One could construct database unique queries to do this, but I think a set of views would make things a lot easier and reusable. Currently the kernel tables let you view everything in the system EXCEPT the actual RDBMS catalog.
Since you can't really ADD a row even if the view ends up as updateable and expect the tables to appear, I don't really see any harm in creating these.
The purpose is NOT for monitoring, but rather to complete the internal representation all the way from CR->object->table/column (for example).
