Supporting Features Added in MySQL 5 - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 286

Instead of defining cumbersome column-specific privileges on many tables, it's easier
to prepare a view containing a limited set of columns from these tables. We can then
grant permissions on the view as a whole.
To activate support for views on a server after an upgrade from a pre-5.0 version,
the administrator has to execute the mysql_upgrade program, as described in the
MySQL manual ( http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/upgrading-from-
previous-series.html ).
Each user must have the appropriate SHOW_VIEW or CREATE_VIEW
privilege to be able to see or manipulate views. These privileges
exist at the global (server), database, and table levels.
Creating a view implies that the user has privileges on the tables involved, or at least
a privilege such as SELECT or UPDATE on all the columns mentioned in the view.
Creating a view from results
We can take advantage of phpMyAdmin's Search (at the table level) or Query (at the
database level) features to build a rather complex query, execute it, and then easily
create a view from the results. We will see how this is done.
We mentioned that a view can be used to limit the visibility of columns (and, in
fact, of tables). Let us say that the number of pages in a book is highly classified
information. We open the book table, click on Search , and choose a subset of the
columns that does not include the page_count column (we might have to open the
Options slider).