Reading your main post seems like what's happening is exactly what our web dev is doing, and I have to agree; I really don't like it. We have a DEV server, however, as he has several projects on the go, he has several DEV databasesFor example Website_dev, Website_Motor, Website_Claims, website_Test. He then manages about 5 trunks on SVN for the website (excluding live) and I don't have any idea how he knows which one has the most up to date file(s) for different items. The databases all have synonyms inside, which means the SQL objects themselves are all "named" the same but it's awful to look at.

I had to update a query for him the other day on Dev, at which point he promptly  told me it wasn't working. Thatw as because i hadn't applied the same update to his other 4 trunks, and he was using one of those. Considering that I wasn't even aware that the others had to be updated I was simply told "Can you update DEV to..." you'd think that that means "update website_dev" not "update website_dev, _test, and all the rest".

It's really not ideal, as you have to effectively micromanage it. Fortuataely, as we're a small company, he's our only WebDev, so he can do it, but add a couple more people and I can easily see things going wrong once (if we ever) get a second.

Personally, I think you need to brow beat until you get the solution you want (having one database per environment). It's definitely something I need to take into consideration if when are expand. Sorry that doesn't really give you an answer on how to deal with it, I'm more saying that I agree with you; your current set up is not the solution.