Here's a nice counterpoint.. I was on a project where the chosen database was Vertica. I think everyone assumed the DBA had used columnar style databases in the

Here's a nice counterpoint.. I was on a project where the chosen database was Vertica. I think everyone assumed the DBA had used columnar style databases in the past. So later we found out the DBA didn't know what a projection was. Projections are the REASON you choose a database like Vertica in an analytics project. In the end many of the various contracting companies started to work together to work around the DBAs ineptitude and work on ways to speed up performance, including projections. We kept him in the loop, but it just felt like the only thing the DBA cared about was permissions and user accounts. In fact that's the only thing we kept calling him for was one of our accounts would suddenly not work. He was also extremely insistent against tools like Liquibase to keep all environments in sync and standardized. Instead our Dev and QA through prod would all have different tables and columns all over the place because the DBA WAS IN CHARGE OF THAT. This was a large organization, and 99% inefficient. There IS a reason large companies are trying to run projects like startups. DBAs are often like pizza flippers, whereas developers don't like doing things multiple times.