Schema-on-Write, Schema-on-Read, Schema-on-Demand

Tessera doesn't make you declare a schema before you can insert. Types register automatically on first use, and property types are inferred from the data you actually send. You get real data in first — a whole file of it, if you like — and worry about the model afterwards, which is the order most projects genuinely discover their model in.

“Schema-free” doesn't mean “schema-blind.” Read-only introspection lets you see exactly which types and properties exist in the store, so you can look at what a million ingested events actually contain before deciding what the canonical shape should be. That's the governance handle that loose ingestion usually lacks.

Once you know the shape, you register it — turning an inferred, ad-hoc structure into a declared one your team and your tools can rely on. Historical data keeps the shape it was written with; you're tightening the contract going forward, not rewriting the past.

Schema isn't a decision you're forced to make at table-creation time and live with forever. It's something you let the data reveal, inspect, and then commit to — in that order.

Strict-schema-from-day-one only works when you already know your data model. For anything actually new, you don't. The teams that ship the cleanest production systems are the ones that started loose, learned, and tightened — not the ones that wrote a 200-table ERD before writing any code.