My point about SAS70 is that your customers want to know their data is safe with you and that you aren't adding people to roles like sysadmin without great care. Rotating developers into production support and giving them sysadmin while they are in production support just seems risky to me. The argument is that developers have the business knowledge to know how to work with what in our case is a very complex schema. The solution in my mind is to have more "permanent" production support staff, who are essentially long-term DBAs and include them in development meetings so they understand business rules and the table relationships etc.

In our case there never was a DBA involved so the database was created by Visio and is very highly normalized. It will be interesting to see how it scales.