Comment With Great Power... (Score 2, Interesting) 402
Of course developers should have some level of access to the production environment. No matter how good your test environment is, it's not going to match the live server in load, or what's in cache, or the concurrent access to some resource, etc.
Our process was to have one person with access, investigating whatever problem via the SQL command line, or the Rails console (let the RoR jokes commence), with another person watching, to make sure they were doing select * and not update or delete. Even then we'd execute stuff in a transaction or sandbox so that we weren't making any permanent changes, although changes to memcache generally can't be rolled back so easily.
I've seen admins, who are adamant that dev not be allowed to change anything, change psql configurations at a whim, crippling DB performance. And then blame dev for poor response times. That's so not cool.