Great departments have great people. No kidding! How do we end up with quality developers? Time has shown it we can’t hire the best for every position and, inevitably, something will come up which will require growth, whether personal or professional, to successfully overcome the challenge. I believe a dba can be a huge help in this area by giving classes on topics which will fill in department gaps. These are some of the classes I’ve given: SQL Profilier; using SQL constraints; performance tuning focusing on basics partly to be able to do something and partly to understand one’s impact; error handling; why memory is so valuable (this also comes up when discussing performance tuning); and reviewing of utility SQL such as the bcp procedure and stored procedure template.
Once there is a basic understanding more can take place in a smaller group or one on one. The goal is to make it so the developers can hand in SQL which always passes the code review and the SQL Servers are never the issue.