> Schema covers the definition of a bunch of related tables. A database can run as many schemas at it wants, ... You're really getting hung up on the way that

> Schema covers the definition of a bunch of related tables. A database can run as many schemas at it wants, ... You're really getting hung up on the way that many DBMSs conflate the traditional meaning of schema (the names and types of the columns) with something slightly different (the database schema along with the actual data in it and some other metadata). In fact your own comment conflates those meanings too! You say "the definition of a bunch of tables" but you seem to be talking about the data in them as well as their definition. This seems like extra evidence that it is better to avoid this term. At least when you're talking about the multiple different schemas (in the DBMS sense) in a database, they very often (not always) have different sets of tables with different column names and types, so they really do have different schemas (in the traditional sense). But here, the focus is really on the data itself being returned (albeit the benefit of it is that it has a more usefully rich schema than a traditional SQL result), so I think calling that data a schema is a bad word choice.