Almost all companies need databases. Very few companies can or want to hire highly skilled database engineers with years of experience of debugging and performance profiling complex applications.

Right, when I go to major client sites, often their people don't know anything about databases really. It's in some random city, and they hire the people that are local.

You get very wildly different levels of skill, and many times very low levels of skill. Then they hire consultants, because we can make the thing go.