Question

By default, objects (tables, stored procedures, etc) are set up with the dbo owner/schema (I think ms sql 2000 calls it owner, while ms sql 2005 calls it schema)

The owner/schema is really a role or user in the database. I’ve always left the default of dbo, but I’ve recently seen some examples in microsoft training books where some of their tables & stored procedures had different owners/schemas. When is it beneficial to do this and why?

Answer 1

The use of schemas is exceptionally beneficial when you have security concerns.

If you have multiple applications that access the database, you might not want to give the Logistics department access to Human Resources records. So you put all of your Human Resources tables into an hr schema and only allow access to it for users in the hr role.

Six months down the road, Logistics now needs to know internal expense accounts so they can send all of these palettes of blue pens to the correct location people. You can then create a stored procedure that executes as a user that has permission to view the hr schema as well as the logistics schema. The Logistics users never need to know what’s going on in HR and yet they still get their data.

You can also use schemas the way cfeduke has suggested and just use them to group things in the object browser. If you are doing this, just be careful because you might end up creating Person.Address and Company.Address when you really just need a single dbo.Address (I’m not knocking your example, cfeduke, just using it to illustrate that both address tables might be the same or they might be different and that YMMV).