A pitiful DBA, ME

For years, I just can't fully dedicate myself to my own work. My title is Oracle DBA which is I am passionate on and what I was looking for. To be an Oracle expert was my career goal once. Maybe it still is. Maybe not. I am not quite sure right now. Seems like nobody in this company knows what a DBA is, what a DBA is supposed to do and how important a DBA is to business. In this company, particularly in this department, nobody makes me feel like a DBA but more like a database operator, or even a database programmer. e.g. I told my manager I was going to apply CPU(Critical Product Update) patches to all our Oracle databases. I explained to her how important it is to do so. And this is to comply with company security policy. Her response made me feel "What hell is the CPU patch? Why do we need to apply those damn patches? Is it really important? Why don't you just put aside that and spend more time on more useful things like programming?" Forgot to tell you the funny thing is I am working for a development team even I take care of all the databases from development to UAT to production. So this development team manages all the related systems from development to production as well. What a mess! From my point of view, nobody here has production support experience. So they think production support is an easy job. Nothing needs to be done as long as the systems are running well. In other words, as long as there is no problem, they think you have done nothing. They think people like me (DBA, UNIX Admin) live an easy work life everyday. They think the production support doesn't take time at all. Only development work is very important. Only development takes time and creates value to business. That's what in these guys mind. So they always demand me to get involved in the programming work, whenever possible. They don't care if I have some other work to do or not. As I say, actually on their mind they think I don't have work to do at all. So when they assign work to me, they don't even ask me if I have some other work to do or not. They just assign. They just tell me to complete what they assign to me. Whenever I tell them I need to do my own job which is a DBA's responsibility and I don't have time to spend on programming, they think, at least they make me feel I tell them a lie and I don't want to write programs for them. Gosh! I miss these days in my previous company. During that period, I was working on shift and really tired physically. It's around 2000 and people were nervous about the millennium worm problem. However, I was happy since I felt being taken care, being respected. Management really appreciated my work. Developers also respect DBAs and often ask us for advices and how to improve the code performance. They all know how important DBAs are and the great value DBAs have to a business success. But here in my current company, I feel really tired both physically and mentally. What I did have never been appreciated. I don't feel being respected at all. Nobody asks me about the code performance, the data model design, never, ever! So it's really a mess in our databases. I told them many many times and they don't care. They think I try to slow down their work, try to stop them from creating revenue for the company. Finally I gave up. What can I do? They threatened me and they told me to stop. 7 years, I've been working for this company this long. I've never get promoted. Actually, I got degraded once due to the office politics. I feel really frustrated working in this company, particularly in this department. I can't see a bright future for my career if I continue. A pitiful DBA!