One aspect that can help with this is separate roles/accounts for dangerous privileges. I.e. if Alice is your senior DBA who would have full access to everythi

One aspect that can help with this is separate roles/accounts for dangerous privileges. I.e. if Alice is your senior DBA who would have full access to everything including deleting the main production database, then it does not mean that the user 'alice' should have the permission to execute 'drop database production' - if that needs to be done, she can temporarily escalate the permissions to do that (e.g. a separate account, or separate role added to the account and removed afterwards, etc). Arguably, if your DB structure changes generally are deployed with some automated tools, then the everyday permissions of senior DBA/developer accounts in the production environment(s) should be read-only for diagnostics. If you need a structural change, make a migration and deploy it properly; if you need an urgent ad-hoc fix to data for some reason (which you hopefully shouldn't need to do very often), then do that temporary privilege elevation thing; perhaps it's just "symbolic" but it can't be done accidentally.