I often hear mentions of "no schema" when people talk about NoSQL, but I think that's a lie; it's not possible for data to have no schema because an application

I often hear mentions of "no schema" when people talk about NoSQL, but I think that's a lie; it's not possible for data to have no schema because an application that assumes its data has no structure can't do anything with that data. However, a schema can be dynamic. Having a dynamic schema implies that you get no guarantees from the database, so the application has to discover and validate the schema at runtime to be able to do useful things. I like data integrity so I prefer static schemas, but sometimes it can be useful to have a component in your tables where you do the extra work of dynamic inspection or just transport it as an opaque blob.