I'm the de facto DB guy at work, WLB is fine... it's very rare that I have to work after-hours. The main reason for this is that our DBs are basically exclusive

I'm the de facto DB guy at work, WLB is fine... it's very rare that I have to work after-hours. The main reason for this is that our DBs are basically exclusively used during business hours, and if you set things up right it's rare that you'll get anything breaking on its own after-hours. Also - maybe this is specific to me, but most emergencies I deal with are of my own creation. It's rare to have a DB spontaniously corrupt a page. Most emergency issues I deal with are performance-related (this used to take 2s, now it's taking 200s) and you can mitigate those ahead of time if you're thoughtful (breaking code up so you lean less on the query optimizer, automatic index maintenance, consistent and well-indexed join paths). Depends what you mean on major impacts. A potentially breaking upgrade is a total nightmare, and never a fun process. But most (almost all?) of the things you do are much lower stakes, and definitely do not take a few quarters.