That's how it was at AOL. But also, in general, people who wrote C code never designed SQL stuff. We'd come up with some requirements, meet with a DBA (who at the time got paid a lot more money, I always assumed because their work was inherently dull), they'd put together stored procedures for use to call, and then do whatever on the physical table side. They did sometimes change the physical table stuff without us having to change anything (not sharding tho, that was edit a TCL file and restart when they said to restart).