Yeah I more concerned “God Mode” is a thing that exists. One would hope that these systems are heavily locked down but my experience maintaining legacy systems makes me think “God mode” is a thing you get because you have to run a quarterly report and it is too much of a hassle setting up the correct permissions.

Anyone who has ever had root on a database server has that access. There's no technology available that prevents the people responsible for correcting failing RAID volumes from reading blocks from /dev/sda. In theory, yes, there are DRM technologies that prevent you from getting a copy of a song Spotify stores in your cache. But those technologies are not used on multi-gigabyte databases.

The only thing that protects that data is professional ethics, and in extremely paranoid (i.e. airgapped) environments, metal detectors.

Sincerely, God Mode on x DBs, where x > 1.