Situation: The dba is an offsite contractor who keeps the entire DAL code checked out in TFS. It would be nice as the front end developer to be able to add columns, and tweak procs and whatnot, without having to rely on waiting for this dude to respond to your emails to do the work.
Question: What would be a recommended solution/process that would allow for more rapid/agile development, while maintaining data integrity as well as peace love and happiness among the team?
Im getting some good feedback on Programmers HERE
There is no general technical answer to your question (unless you can define a very limited kind of needed access, which can be supplied via an API he provides for you in the DAL, etc.).
Assuming you already tried to talk with him and probably even escalated the issue, there is probably a valid reason for limiting access (security, data model integrity, performance tuning, version control etc.).
Try to understand the reasoning behind his approach, and to better define your actual needs, it is possible that after that you can formulate an improvement to your architecture (such as the aforementioned API) or your development process. Most importantly, talk frankly about your concerns, communication can go a long way, as long as you are willing to understand the other side.