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> I would argue that it's not authoritative.

I think the word you're looking for is "enforced". Where there are multiple schemas, one can certainly be the "authority", even if it's not enforced across all data.

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Whatever terminology you use, every place you loop through records doing stuff with them, you'll either have to decide what to do with oddly-shaped records or implicitly decide to let exceptions occur at that point. Whereas if PostgreSQL tells you that `user` has a `email character varying(255) NOT NULL`, you can be sure that every `user` does. The only place you need a conditional related to that is when trying to insert an invalid record.

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