The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for intelligently recommending schemas based on user input that defines a portion of a data structure. An intelligent auto-complete function can identify characteristics of the user input and, based on these characteristics, recommend schemas that are most likely to be selected by the user to complete the data structure or portion of the data structure. The identified characteristics of the user input can be compared to characteristics of defined schemas or of other data structures to identify schemas that are most likely to match the user's intent. These schemas are then recommended to the user. Such schemas can define the recommended shape of the data structure being defined, including data types for a particular column, columns to add to the data structure, or can define additional data structures to be added such as additional tables to a database.