Sounds similar to this place 2 years ago, though we just had massive performance and stability issues, not deadlocks. Through a lot of work and an upgrade to SQL 2005, we got things stable and moderatly fast. I wrote coding standards, with change management and the DBA manager instituted code reviews. offered help and advice to developers, etc

For a while, things were fine, but recently we've been backsliding, and IT's reputation is going downhill, along with the quality of the solutions we're putting out.

In theory, I'm supposed to approve any code going into production. In reality, if I say it's not up to standard and is likely to cause problems, I get overridden by management 3+ levels above me. <sarcasm> After all, we can aways fix it later, right? </sarcasm>

I'm tired of fighting now. Every week its the same battle. Every time we have an incident, the same things come up in the post-mortem, but nothing ever changes.

We've got no data architects. We've got two application architects who were promoted to that position from development. They've got no architect training, though they are trying very hard to learn. The developers often design the tables without any input. There's no technical managment in the developer area. The PMs promise dates without consulting anyone, then push to make those dates regardless.

I usually find out about new development when it's too late to change the table design (once development is complete usually, sometimes a day before deployment)

Think I'm going to go and have a nice long chat with my boss now.