Another way of looking at it is that you have a schema whether you like it or not. If I write some code to sum up account balances, it's going to expect a seri

Another way of looking at it is that you have a schema whether you like it or not. If I write some code to sum up account balances, it's going to expect a series of account objects, and they need to have some `.balance` field. And those fields need to be decimals, because addition will choke if they're not. Your code implicitly defines a schema, and it's utterly rigid because it will crash if the data structure is incorrect. Or worse. Imagine if some of the "balances" are actually some irrelevant field that happens to be a number, or some are missing because some of the JSON misspelled the field name and you skipped those records. Now the result you're processing is silently wrong, and who knows how far the corrupt data gets before someone catches it? All schemas are enforced rigidly because that's how computers work. The difference is whether you want the DBMS to nag you while you're coding, or whether you'd rather be woken in the middle of the night by an angry customer or boss.