Schemas and filegroups

In our consulting travels we don't see a lot of databases that use schemas. Schemas provide a logical grouping, so associated tables can be grouped together. Examples of this may be an Authentication schema to group tables such as users and roles. Or customer tables being in a customer schema (e.g. Customer Details, Customer Orders, Customer Billing etc). This can lead to simpler naming conventions for your objects. I usually use a Report schema for all reporting stored procedures and any aggregated reporting tables. Once you have started using this logical grouping you can then extend the power of schemas by placing each schema onto its own file group. Then all the Authentication tables are in the Authentication file group on their own physical file. This gives you the ability to easily move groups of tables onto different IO subsystems to improve performance if a hot spot has been identified. Schemas can also help in security by limiting access to certain schemas and they can also provide the ability to easily decouple parts of your application.