> a DBA should not be a gatekeeper of what gets put into a database. Storing 200 bytes of extra data per row costs you absolutely nothing. To be fair, isn't it

> a DBA should not be a gatekeeper of what gets put into a database. Storing 200 bytes of extra data per row costs you absolutely nothing. To be fair, isn't it the DBA's job to gatekeep the database? The application programmers and business managers don't have the in-depth understanding to know how every individual change will effect the database. Of course they should follow best practices, but it's not really their job to know it inside and out - that's what the DBA does. You don't know that 200 bytes per row would cost nothing - that's the DBA's job to understand it's cost. And we aren't talking about the amount of data, but without an in-depth understanding of what tables they were adding it to, how they're indexed, cached, etc, then you don't know the real cost. That 200 bytes might mean less can be stored in memory, if this is a frequently fetched table then that could be bad. That's not to say the DBA made the right call, but that we don't have enough information to know if it was.