Overall, the law has been a good thing as many expressed above. Allowing DBAs to tighten down production, while using SOX as the vehicle to get it done. This has improved our production environments stability considerably.

The annual audit is a good thing, although the auditors don't really know what they are asking for or how to decipher the information generally. Thankfully powershell helps make these audits quicker than doing tons of screenshots. I have documented some of the scripts on my blog that I use to make the audit faster.

A significant portion of my work from time to time is the audit, and while it can be painful, it does help us find nagging things and force us to review our environments more frequently.