It's exactly as it sounds: a SQL view on a database server. It manifests as a SQL table backed by a query. It's mind-bendingly simple.
You can connect to it via a native db connector or ODBC. It's also accessible to a wide range of tools including Excel, Tableau, or any number of programming languages.
In Python you can pull data from it into a Pandas dataframe via TurbODBC (which recently added Apache Arrow in-memory support). In R, you can connect to it via dplyr. Apache Spark can get data from it via JDBC. You can experiment with it via Jupyter Notebooks.
