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> The shape and structure of your data is always defined within a schema Maybe we're already agreed on this, but for clarity my point is that the common notion
by throwaway894345 5y ago
> The shape and structure of your data is always defined within a schema
Maybe we're already agreed on this, but for clarity my point is that the common notion of a schema is strictly "the shape of the data" and not "a container for the data, the shape of the data, and a bunch of other stuff". I agree that this latter definition is probably shared across many relational databases and not just Postgres.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> but for clarity my point is that the common notion of a schema is strictly "the shape of the data" and not "a container for the data, the shape of the data, and a bunch of other stuff". Yeah, I see what you are saying I just disagree. Most people who know either use, in the context of RDBMSs, know both, and resolve the ambiguity by context. This is fairly normal, it's very common for words to have multiple common definitions.
- throwaway894345 5y agoIn my experience, this is fairly "advanced" knowledge. Lots of people who grind out SQL queries all day as analysts or vanilla software engineers don't know the SQL sense of the term. > Most people who know either use, in the context of RDBMSs, know both, and resolve the ambiguity by context. This is fairly normal, it's very common for words to have multiple common definitions. The RDBMS domain alone doesn't suffice to resolve the ambiguity because "structure of data" and "container of tables/etc" are both relevant. I would definitely contend that application developers and operators (though perhaps not DBAs) need to talk about "structure of data" a lot more than I need to talk about "container of tables/etc".