We're in Minnesota, so this time of year the term "heaven" is debatable.

Sounds like you've still got a bit of "us vs. them" going on... they might be chucking a database design over the wall at you.

For what it's worth, we're generating our persistent object model from the database design (with plenty of app team input) which keeps things in pretty good alignment and helps to ensure that we can migrate the existing data from the legacy system.

Good luck!