The company I currently work for had a similar situation till I got here.

There was actually no admin on the databases other than automatically scheduled backups. No re-indexing, no/very little performance tuning, no index-use monitoring, no automated integrity checks, etc., just a daily full backup and hourly log backups.

The .NET devs wrote all of their own procs, views, etc.

The first database I started working on had lots of problems caused by this. These guys are good C# devs, but they know just enough about SQL to get into trouble, without knowing enough to get back out of it.

For example, there's a hierarchy table. Resolving it was being done by multiple recursive cursors. One day, about a week after I arrived, all the web pages started timing out. They quickly tracked the problem down to the ten or twelve procs that were crawling the hierarchy. The web timeout was set at 30 seconds, and the minimum run-time on the procs was now 35 seconds. This was three weeks after all of this code went live on the production server, and the quantity of data in the hierarchy table was simply too much for the procs to resolve. I changed it to a more efficient function, changed all the procs so they referenced the function (instead of each one crawling the hierarchy in its own unique way), fixed the indexes, and got the maximum run time down to 12 milliseconds, from 35 seconds minimum (one particularly complex hierarchy took 8 minutes to crash and never did finish, till I fixed it).

There were dozens of other implementations of a similar nature. I've got most of them fixed now. And I have automatic index and integrity maintenance going. Maximum and average run-time on queries are all way down.

It wasn't a question of me being in any way smarter or better or whatever. It was just that I know SQL better than they do. The procs they had written were very good at following procedural best-practices, and very bad at following SQL best-practices. Simple as that.

The IS manager is a good DBA and SQL dev, but he's too caught up in managing the team, interminable and innumerable meetings, etc.

(There are two more servers and six more databases for me to tame. Should be interesting.)