In fact they have asked us to vote on our developer heroes, and they will award them during a big celebration at Oracle Open World. Sure you have met one SQL guru, or a PL/SQL programmer, or someone really concerned about database design? Since I am a DBA I think that we should support our database developers since they are doing their part to make sure that the database, and database application that we will support later is as good as possible.
It starts with a good design, then hopefully as much as possible of the hard work will be done in SQL or PL/SQL close to the data, and finally presented beautifully in a web application done in APEX, possibly delivered through Oracle REST Data Services to make it extra secure.
What are the alternatives? A bunch of coders that starts out without any planning or previous knowledge of the database (because it is just a persistent storage they don't want to relate to). They also want to do as much as possible in their own app far away, so they happily offload half the database to do so, and blame it on the network if it does not perform. The end result is a a mess that does not perform or scale, but you get to manage it from release until eternity.
Here is what you need to give something back before it is too late:
https://community.oracle.com/community/database/awards
