Default schemas in SQL Server can be a blessing, since they reduce the need to specify the schema when creating DDL statements in T-SQL. However, relying on the default schema when creating DML statements can be problematic. A recent question on dba.stackexchange.com asked “Does T-SQL have a Schema search path?”, similar to PostgreSQL implements the
search_pathparameter. This post shows how schemas are implemented in SQL Server. We’ll also see why it’s important to always specify the schema when using SQL Server.
A lot of this behavior goes back to the pre-2005 era. 2005 introduced schemas as logical separators, whereas pre-2005 they were more of a security measure (and dbo was the database owner’s schema). I completely agree that you should specify two-part names in-database. It’s a tiny bit faster (which adds up when you’re doing thousands of transactions per second) and reduces ambiguity.