After you talk to the database administrators regarding training, also ask them about:

a. Normalization-do they generally normalize to third normal form? Higher?

b. In general, how much time is spent on normalization for a large or enterprise-level database?

c. What are the three biggest chronic problems faced by each of the database administrators?

d. How often do they have to modify and/or update the database schema? Do they have a formal process for identifying and making updates, or is it done on an ad hoc basis?

e. If they were the clo in their organization, what would they change?