Schema Ownership Standard¶

Purpose¶

The Schema Ownership Standard defines how Spring Boot Modulith modules own persistence structures.

Ownership Model¶

Owner	Responsibility
Domain module	Owns source tables, read models, outbox records, and migration files for its facts.
Analytics	Owns reporting projections and insight records, not source facts.
Intelligence	Owns AI memory records and reasoning data, not operational source facts.
Administration	Owns configuration and governance workflow data, not source facts.
Shared kernel	Does not own business tables.

Rules¶

One table has one owning module.
A module may reference another module's identifier but must not own the other module's facts.
Cross-module writes are forbidden.
Cross-module reads require approved APIs, events, projections, or read contracts.
Migration ownership follows the owning module.
Ownership must be visible in future database specs and changelog paths.

Ownership Flow¶

flowchart LR
    ModuleA[Owning Module]
    TableA[(Owned Tables)]
    Event[Domain Event]
    ModuleB[Consuming Module]
    ProjectionB[(Owned Projection)]

    ModuleA --> TableA
    ModuleA --> Event
    Event --> ModuleB
    ModuleB --> ProjectionB

Forbidden Patterns¶

Shared business tables across modules.
Generic lookup tables that quietly become a shared dumping ground.
One module applying migrations to another module's table.
Analytics projection tables used as operational write targets.
Intelligence memory used as source-domain data.