I think that depends.  I was on a project where we absolutely as developers had to care about DB performance.  We even wrote a tool for Sybase that monitored the query plans of long running queries.  We discovered that the optimizer was really poor on Sybase 11.X and we needed to force indexes a lot.<p>Once you learn that DB performance is not a gradual thing, you get into the grove of it.  It goes from good to horrible once you hit that magic memory &#x2F; table size.<p>Truthfully, if your developers are the ones writing tools to figure out real-time performance, you probably want to start thinking about what&#x27;s going on. (obviously this does not apply to the parent poster)