Where I work, new applications that are being developed that will use their own relational database, must have their database-models (conceptual, then physical ) reviewed and aproved by DBAs.
Things looked after are normalization, antipatterns, table and column naming standards, etc.
Is this really a DBA's responsability to do this ?
or should it be, in a greater extend, the responsability of app designers and architects ?
Depends on how database-savvy your developers are, but normally yes. DBAs are usually better at spotting potential performance issues, plus it gives them a heads-up in case they need to do anything special or unusual when creating the database (allocating space on multiple drives, setting up failover plans, allocating unusually large buffers or temp segments, etc). Plus, as you point out, they need to enforce any naming standards and data domains. They also will point out if some data you are using is already being stored in another database, to reduce data duplication.
Yes, that practice seems pretty standard to me.
If you have DBAs (whose expertise should include database modeling, normalization, table-naming structure, etc.) I would expect you would want to use them...
Why would you have DBAs and not want their their expertise and input? It seems like it is the obvious choice.
