What do you consider DBA level skills? Because you mention in one case people using SELECT * where they only needed a small subset of the fields. I'm all for your message that everyone should be aware of the database, but I don't consider that a DBA level mistake. I've just worked with some astonishingly good DBAs before, and I while I'm not a slouch it would be impossible to catch up with them without years of intensive study.
Anyway, I'm splitting hairs. Your presentation was great, and the people at SO are very impressive overall. Thanks for posting it.
I consider DBA-level skills as the ability to read an execution plan, figure out what indexes are being used, know the difference between a good plan and a bad one, and figure out how to rewrite your query to get the performance & plan you want without just adding indexes willy-nilly. Another good example would be knowing when it's right to normalize tables versus flattening out the data structures - you can't just knee-jerk and normalize everything because it's the best practice.
I wouldn't say that developers need to know about HA/DR, replication, memory tuning, SAN setups, etc, though. Just the how-queries-work and how-data-is-stored angles.
Thanks for the compliments! I had fun doing that one.
Anyway, I'm splitting hairs. Your presentation was great, and the people at SO are very impressive overall. Thanks for posting it.