Customers also want to know why they are supposed to use ‘Filtered’ views to query their CRM data directly from the database.

These are the reasons I’m aware of for using filtered views:

The filtered views do five things for you:

1) They are ‘fully supported’, meaning that they shouldn’t break on upgrades. 

2) Convert times from utc to user’s local timezone (UTC times are still available in the filtered views, but the default time column is changed to local time)

3) Filter out records flagged as to be deleted.

4) Filter out records the current user doesn't have permission to see.

5) Clean up and hide a bunch of implementation details, like mapping state codes from ints like 0 to strings like 'Active'.

The only drawback is that filtered views may slow down queries as they join in a lot of tables to present their data, and you will want to keep track of timezone conversion challenges (if a user entered a time in eastern daylight time, it’s stored in UTC/Greenwich Mean, then the querying user is in Australia… what day did the event happen on?)