I've always approached DBA tasks with the heart of a developer who loves automation. Granted, I don't look at data like that, but that's a different conversation. 😉

When it became obvious that a database needed to be tuned, I didn't click my way around SSMS, figuring out what needed to be reorganized or rebuilt, I dug into the system tables and developed an automated process for doing it. When a text file had to be loaded and populated every day, I didn't even consider loading it manually every day. I wrote a procedure to automate it. It's like that with everything. Unless we automate things, we're stuck doing them manually and end up having no time to do anything else.

This is certainly nothing new. Even when I was doing development only and had no DBA responsibilities whatsoever, I tried to automate everything. Writing manual processes and manual steps just builds a fiefdom from which you can never escape. You'll be bogged down in manual stuff forever and never have the opportunity to grow.

On a separate note, nice artwork, Jeff. My compliments on finding the "i" in team. 😀