Interesting editorial Phil factor.

I believe we have all seen this happen.

Where I work, we at least set up new users for each database and limits their possibilities. I find it hard to do much more than that, save for encrypting the passwords in the config files of course.

About several systems using the same database, while I am against this it can still be useful sometimes. Since I wanted to avoid this, in the latest application I was building from scratch this last year even reporting services talks with the application instead of the database directly. We have calculation logic in the application and do not want redundancy with all the issues that comes with it, so we did not duplicate the calculation logic in the database as well since it was not needed. Instead I let ssrs talk with some wcf services that I wrote. This I have to mention was somewhat annoying at first but it did work.