[_jal]

DBAs still have their place. In my shop, we have more DBAs than infrastructure people.

When you have a small team working on a given tool that only really needs to manage its own data, it really doesn't matter. But some point, you do need expert gatekeepers to tell engineers when they're Doing It Wrong when there are many heterogenous clients accessing large datastores for different purposes, complex audit requirements, etc.

[felixyz]

Yes specialization is often useful. But the divide between developers and DBAs seems to have been similar to the dev/ops divide. Probably still is in many places. There is always a need for seniors or specialists to guide work, I'm not against that. But something like DevOps for RDBMS is needed. DevDat?