I’m a DBRE. I spend a good portion of my day with a shell into one or more prod databases. The schema definitions in code are scattered between ORM model definitions, Alembic migrations, and Liquibase migrations, so the only reliable way I have of understanding a schema as it exists is to view it. Plus, I am very comfortable with SQL, and the various system catalogs of both MySQL and Postgres, so it’s a ton easier to work with.

Truly sensitive customer information is encrypted, and on an isolated DB cluster that no one has regular access to. I also operate with a read-only grant, because manual writes to a prod DB is generally a terrible idea.