A temporary table is a table in a relational database that stores intermediate, temporary data. Complex queries commonly require storage for large amounts of intermediate data, such as information from joins. When you implement temporary tables, business intelligence tools can retrieve this data from the temporary table instead of the SQL data service. This results in an increase in performance.

Temporary tables also provide increased security in two ways. First, only the user of the active session can access the tables. Also, the tables persist while a session is active, and the database drops the tables when the connection closes.