> I'm now wondering if there is something about the role that lends itself to such behavior. One day they are super pleasant, helpful and friendly. The next they are chewing people out for seemingly minor and random transgressions and saying things like "ruining my fucking database”.

There’s something to your observation. Ok, I’ve held enterprise and application DBA roles, literally decades of experience. Sometimes the cruelty and dominance is necessary because of the responsibility focused on the position. I’ve often proposed being over-accommodating is important for non-architect application DBA roles, whereas the implications of SRE and resource planning might require an enterprise DBA to immediately and summarily cut off stupid/ignorant ideas before they acquire momentum and screw things up for the business. A DBA might not have time to be patient when resource constrained. Also, all too often people ‘suppose’ what the data specialist is doing and gum things up trying to be “helpful” when they should be asking for help, costing much frustration.

I’ve had developers try to take on DBA responsibility and find enlightenment when they learn enough to grok the rationale behind my seemingly arbitrary demands...I try to spend time as a developer periodically so I can refresh my developer perspective and not just expect engineers to automatically conform to my narrow perspective.