Agreed; depends hugely on system and project/team. I'm in the ERP space (Fun!:), which means a lot of code is effectively legacy and a lot of standards/methods

Agreed; depends hugely on system and project/team. I'm in the ERP space (Fun!:), which means a lot of code is effectively legacy and a lot of standards/methods are also effectively... old :-). We are lucky on my current project to have developers who ARE senior and experienced and pretty good at data modelling; but there is still a lot of need for somebody to own the back end system and design maintenance and notice problems and optimize things holistically as opposed to program by program. So I guess I should've clarified - a good developer certainly helps but does not obviate the need for DBA in many scenarios.