The last place I worked had a very similar environment. Our system used Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise as the backend. On the development Sybase server, there were multiple database environments which were assigned to individual developers/teams for their use. This provided the sandbox for them to do whatever they needed to do safely without disrupting anybody else. There was very extensive use of scripts to create and alter the database in terms of table structure and stored procedures. Needless to say these scripts were kept in a version control system (StarTeam).

So Chris's article rang a lot of bells for me and I have proposed that the same approach be used for an upcoming Zope project.