Why INFORMATION_SCHEMA views should not be used to determine the schema of an object?

In your case yes, the statement there is inaccurate. I talk about this in this blog post (and complained about it in this ancient Connect item), where I implore people to use the sys catalog views over INFORMATION_SCHEMA: The warning really should state that the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views are incomplete; the wording above implies that they might be incorrect, which in itself is incorrect. In 2011, they said: Hi Aaron, That particular wording has been in the topic since 2005. But, I see your point. We'll revist the wording and try to make it more clear. Now that we can submit pull requests for suggested changes to the documentation, it might be time for someone to make them pay attention to it again. 13 years is long enough. What is INFORMATION_SCHEMA SQL server? An information schema view is one of several methods SQL Server provides for obtaining metadata. Information schema views provide an internal, system table-independent view of the SQL Server metadata. The information schema views are defined in a special schema named INFORMATION_SCHEMA The INFORMATION_SCHEMA SQL server database is an ANSI standard set of views we can find in SQL Server, but also MySQL. Other database systems also have either exactly such or similar databases implemented. It provides read-only access to details related to databases and their objects (tables, constraints, procedures, views…)