Comment by scriptkiddy

The problem isn't so much that a junior had access to the production Db. The problem is that the junior's dev setup had access to the production Db and could nuke the whole thing with a few misplaced keystrokes. I'm working on a product currently where I am the only dev. I have a pretty large production Db. I also have a smaller clone of that same Db on my local machine for development purposes. I can only access the production Db by directly shelling into the machine it's running on or performing management commands on one of the production worker machines(which I also need to shell into). This was not very difficult to set up and ensures that my development environment cannot in any way affect the production environment.

Also, why even distribute the production credentials at all? Only the most senior DBAs or devs should have access to production credentials.