Certainly in the production environment, the buck stops with the DBA for any bad structures. Because of this the DBA must be protector on the Production, QA and Test environments.

IMHO the average programmer does not understand database performance issues especially in the case of large databases making them dangerous if left unchecked. I favour the programmer having his own database to code against etc, but there sghould also be a common pre-test build environment and corresponding database. Any database scripts should be under code control just like programs. In this context, the DBA is the programmer.

Sorry Matt, but in my experience ex Access programmers are the most dangerous when it comes to [not] understanding the performance issues arising from 100+GB OLTP databases.