Oracle Administration...?

My Oracle experience is, admittedly, definitely out-of-date and many things have changed. I find, though, that I'm even having trouble understanding how to do the first operation that I need to attempt, that is, creating a database. It seems from the documentation that this operation is reserved to a very limited set of people -- namely the DBAs. While this is logical in a production environment, I'm not quite sure what to make of this for a DB application development environment. Could any Oracle developers answer the following questions:

1. Do you allow your developers to create databases or reserve this capability to a select group (the DBAs)?
2. How do you handle test databases? Do developers make a copy of the master database to populate for testing purposes?
3. Do you allow developers to alter databases so that they may change metadata and test ideas for new applications? Or is this reserved to DBAs?
4. How do you change control the database design? On a different database system, we've maintained SQL scripts for building the database -- does this make sense for Oracle?

Thanks for your help...

--


====================================================================

David Masterson					Consilium, Inc.
(415) 691-6311					640 Clyde Ct.
davidm_at_consilium.com				Mtn. View, CA  94043


====================================================================

"Bill Gates says no matter how much more power we can supply, he'll develop 
 some really exciting software that will bring the machine to its knees."
-- Intel VP David House, In _EE_Times_, 16 October 1989