Physical schema

Physical schema is a term used in data management to describe how data is to be represented and stored (files, indices, et al.) in secondary storage using a particular database management system (DBMS) (e.g., Oracle RDBMS, Sybase SQL Server, etc.).

In the ANSI/SPARC Architecture three schema approach, the internal schema is the view of data that involved data management technology. This is as opposed to an external schema that reflects an individual's view of the data, or the conceptual schema that is the integration of a set of external schemas.