I'm creating a (relatively) complex VIEW using MySQL 5.0.2. I'm new to VIEW's and was hoping that the VIEW would do some sort of caching on the result rows returned from the SELECT queries that defines it. However, it appears that when I make a SELECT from the VIEW the definition queries are re-run by MySQL and so I don't get any sort of performance improvement.

Is there any way to cache the VIEW I've defined or achieve something similiar using MySQL only? Obviously I can code something up to create a cached table that updates periodically... was hoping VIEW would be the answer though. :-)

View does not make any performance increament.It degrades it! because of overhead in rebuilding some queries on base tables that view is made from.
So there is no reason to use virew for performance but it is very useful concept.