Thoughts on Mysql_Views and Tables in same model

You can do this of course also with CI. Its depends on your personal style of coding and doing database operations and of the situation. i like views and use them where ever it makes sence. As performance reason a view should alwasy have a where clause otherwise its better do make a normal select.

I use views also if the client user / programmer should only work with a result and the database structur should be hold private. So that would be for security reasons.