TABLE OF CONTENTS Schemas are nothing more than containers with a fancy name. They are extremely important, though, because they are integral to the creation of object namespaces in SQL Server, as well as to the administration of ownership and privileges for those objects. Schemas are not new in SQL Server 2005. They did exist in previous versions as required by the SQL specification, but unfortunately, users and schemas were implicitly tied together. In SQL Server 2005, the schemas and users have been separated. There are some very good reasons for this change including enhanced security and simplified administration. We will explore this change and its impact on security and administration throughout this chapter.
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) SQL specification requires implementing schemas in a database management system (DBMS) in order for that DBMS to be considered SQL compliant. Schemas are simply a collection of objects within a database. Throughout this section you will learn more about how and why schemas exist, how they have been implemented in previous versions of SQL Server, how this has changed in the latest version, and how the change will help administrators implement better security in databases.
As I said before, schemas are nothing more than containers. Schemas exist in order to implement two rules of the SQL specification:
All objects within a schema must have unique names. The schema forms part of that namespace.
All objects within a schema must have the same owner. Objects in...
