Answers inline
>1. Is there a performance hit when using Views that reference other Views because it seems that once a view returns its rows and then another view acts upon that record set, then that record set would have no indexes, thus making query execution slow down.
When you query against a view, your query and the view query are combined. The resultant query is then optimized and executed. It is possible to see performance problems when you get views nested three and four deep, especially if SQL Server decides to create temp. tables as part of the solution.
>2. The project lead wants all tables to have a corresponding view created, "Select * from tablename" so that they can write inline SQL statement from their VB app containing filteragainst that view (with some criteria.) Wouldn't it be faster if they ran those queries directly against the table directly.
I would suggest using stored procedures instead of using pass-through queries to access the data. It is a proven best practice.
-Mike