Ah I see. Postgres uses the word in the sense that it's used in the SQL spec, though, and it means pretty much what you're describing. The key difference is tha

Ah I see. Postgres uses the word in the sense that it's used in the SQL spec, though, and it means pretty much what you're describing. The key difference is that I think you're talking about the human-readable file (which in the SQL world is written in SQL DDL), whereas the standard means it as closer to being the internal/runtime representation of that "shape/structure of data". It's helpful to think of "the database" as the actual physical storage, and the schema is what the db uses to make sense of how to manipulate/query that data. From that perspective, the SQL DDL is scripting language to manipulate those schema objects ("objects" in the OOP sense, "schema objects" has an actual specific meaning in SQL).