I am after some general advice on the relative performance of views, queries or using SQL to generate intermediate tables.

Roughly, the situation is as follows...
I will be generating an extract from a Foxpro database (destined for a comma separated text file).
The extract requires 3 tables to be joined & some filters to be applied.
The extract will normally include about 95% of records from the primary table (after some are filtered) plus related records from the other tables.
There could be up to 300,000 records in the primary table.

Some conversions etc have to be performed on the result set before it is output to a text file.
All the tables are local.

Would there be any significant performance differences between say views or just executing SQL-SELECTs to generate this type of extract?

Any tips or comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Craig