DBAs were a bottleneck. In the best case, you’d throw your application’s data needs over the wall to the DBAs (remember, this was the waterfall era) and hope th

DBAs were a bottleneck. In the best case, you’d throw your application’s data needs over the wall to the DBAs (remember, this was the waterfall era) and hope they’d update the schema for you in a timely manner. In the worst case, the DBAs were petty tyrants who stifled progress. In the worser case, they were incompetent and you ended up with all these applications directly reading and writing the database, making schema changes impossible and coupling applications in obtuse, incredibly difficult to fix ways. In any case, designing a single schema that encompassed all the needs of the organization and could grow and change as the organization did was nearly always too much to ask. This was in the days of enterprise data modeling where people believed there really was just one data model or object model that could represent the whole org, independent of the needs of any given application. I don’t think anybody believes that any more.