[aNoob7000]

I think it depends on the environment. Yes, most production and even some test databases are critical to businesses. Any downtime or severe performance issues cause a lot of finger-pointing.

Where I work, most database patches are applied to test environments and let soak for a couple of months before rolling out to production.

And yes, I work a lot on weekends. My only complaint about my career as a DBA is that most of our work is behind the scenes and goes unnoticed until something breaks.

[eatonphil]

I can't judge your personal position/responsibilities but normally I think of DBA and database developer as not being the same thing (except for at small database startups where there's more overlap). At medium+ -sized database companies I've talked to the database developers are on call but likely don't have access to production. They are on call for bug reports from production users. Whereas DBAs are folks directly responsible for the database in production.