I agree that these thought processes are an excellent way of considering our databases, but with experience often these ideas will always be just that. I have often had ideas within our organisation, for example the new user trigger which could create an AD account and scripts etc.

Our network guy reminded me of the redundancy and dependability of systems on other systems. If the database server goes offline for any specific period of time (which it rarely does of course!) how would these processes be executed without it? In the end I thought this was a completely useless argument to get involved in. He was partly right, but the amount of time processes like these would save our technicians and the network admin himself would surely account for any extra work which may be needed due to a system being down which is rarely offline for more than 5 minutes a year!

...this said, i'm completely in favour of DBAs to think like this, i think it's a great idea. As DBAs we see a lot of the business processes, but probably for most of us any adaptations to these processes are (as stated) out of our scope. Which is completely unfortunate and a great loss for the organisations we work for!

{/rant}