I must admit that I don't know all that much about the DBAs job, but, yes, I mean the folks who deal with the beast that's cleanly abstracted away behind some programming interface, which is as much as I ever see of a database.
The DBAs are the people hidden away somewhere (in my experience usually in a basement) who make sure that the database is going to be there when your application tries to find it - so it's up and running, secure, backed-up, maintained, consistent, load-balanced, ready to fail-over somewhere else, and all the rest. How they do that I don't know; J2EE takes the view that developers and architects don't really need to know anything about databases other than they're somewhere to persist data - so I don't.
DBAs are also fairly helpful when it comes to translating quality of service requirements (e.g. response times) into hardware requirements and software licences, although when it comes to actually accessing it I might suggest that they usually say 'no' to any request until you've asked it three times. Very protective of their baby, DBAs...
edit: that's a fair bit about something I don't know much about - it's really my perception of the job, rather than anything else. However, I get the impression that the skills are in demand and quite well paid, which is why I suggested it might be something to look towards.