Revenant (5/10/2011)
"... you're being paid for that job, so you are responsible. That means you have to learn how the technology in your environment works and how to solve the problems you have."Steve, there is a hidden flaw in this approach: people love to learn about things they already know, and they (usually) do not proactively learn about things they do not know but they might need. It implies that you need an outsider's look to help you see what you don't know, but in a company that would mean that your (hopefully) more experienced boss...
There are a lot of people that enjoy learning new things. That's how I got into DBA work. I was on a support team for a product and started diving into SQL to troubleshoot issues further before sending them to Dev. It's a little different than what Steve was talking about because it wasn't part of my job but something extra I could do.
Hopefully people in this situation will have someone else in the company that knows SQL well that can help out but I'm guessing that's frequently not the case. Which means knowing resources in the community can really help out. The forums here are good, I recently started testing a backup solution that's very thoroughly coded to use instead of coding a new one myself, and read blogs to get a feel for what's out there and what may be handy.