Part of it is that DBA's got a bad reputation for bottlenecking projects for many different reasons. Some of it legitimate, as they wanted to make sure schema d

Part of it is that DBA's got a bad reputation for bottlenecking projects for many different reasons. Some of it legitimate, as they wanted to make sure schema design was consistent, properly normalized, and followed org standards; but some DBA's were control-hungry. Therefore, developers tried to minimize their need to go through a DBA by doing more data-ish things inside the application itself. That's more of a staff management problem than a technology problem, but OOP had the "fad cred" of the time and often bowled over DBA's. The pendulum has started to swing the other way as reinventing the database & querying in applications has proved messy.