As a developer at all the jobs I've had, I've never even had access to the production database, full stop - only the server admins did. If I needed something from prod I'd go through them. I don't even consider it inconvenient.
The distance between the developer and the production database is directly proportional with the size of the company. The same is true for the amount of paperwork needed for even the simplest things.
For some company sizes a feedback cycle measured in days is not good enough and may kill the business.
There is a whole lot of things that could be applied which would have prevented this, before needing to hire a separate server admin as an interface to the production database. :D
