What is the difference between a schema and a table and a database?

Question

This is probably a n00blike (or worse) question. But I\'ve always viewed a schema as a table definition in a database. This is wrong or not entirely correct. I don\'t rememb

Answer 1

This particular posting has been shown to relate to Oracle only and the definition of Schema changes when in the context of another DB.

Probably the kinda thing to just google up but FYI terms do seem to vary in their definitions which is the most annoying thing :)

In Oracle a database is a database. In your head think of this as the data files and the redo logs and the actual physical presence on the disk of the database itself (i.e. not the instance)

A Schema is effectively a user. More specifically it's a set of tables/procs/indexes etc owned by a user. Another user has a different schema (tables he/she owns) however user can also see any schemas they have select priviliedges on. So a database can consist of hundreds of schemas, and each schema hundreds of tables. You can have tables with the same name in different schemas, which are in the same database.

A Table is a table, a set of rows and columns containing data and is contained in schemas.

Definitions may be different in SQL Server for instance. I'm not aware of this.