I have a view that is returning four columns of data to be pushed to an external program. When I simply query the view ("Select * from schema.view_name") I get 10353 rows. When I run the actual SQL that created the view (I literally copied and pasted what Oracle had stored, minus the "Create or Replace" statement), I get 238745 rows.
Any ideas why this might occur?
Best guess: when you run the query standalone you're not running it in the same schema the view was created in (I am inferring this from the fact that you included the schema name in your example SELECT). The schema where you're running the query either has its own table with the same name as one of the base tables in the view, or one of the names is a synonym pointing to yet another view that contains only a subset of the rows in the underlying table.