Right, it's never good to keep a career or industry dependent on someone else not learning the basic secrets. When being a DBA becomes an art form, that's when the best people shine.

And I forgot about restores - that's the other #1 biggest problem with newbies. I once ran into a basic restore problem: 200G free disk and the restore needed 300 (50 data, 250 log - never truncated). Nobody thought to test the restore before someone dropped a table.

Part of the question I have is who is the target market for MSSQL ? Novice users or experts? People coming from Foxpro/Access or Oracle? (I'd suggest Teradata if I knew anything more than its name)