I am currently stuck in the scenario Old Hand describes......with the addition of "rock star" developers who design their own databases, in Access, do all of their .Net development against it.

Only when they feel it is ready for UAT do they send the Access file to me "to upsize" or they do it them selves on a dev box and ask the dba to backup/restore to another box for UAT.

The DBA then becomes the bad guy for holding things up by wanting database changes. The devs are perfectly happy with columns named "Default", "PostalCode/Zip Code".....or tables named "Tbl Inventory Items in Error / Not Found".

I am at my wits end trying to get this place running properly. I've only been here a year and a half and feel like I'm making no progress as everything is a battle. 52 servers - 1200+ databases - 2 dba's - the other dba was hired 5 months ago - they've gone through 5 dba's in 5 years.....nobody is "getting it" 🙁