Although I started out as an Analyst/Programmer on an HP3000 mini-computer my route to becoming a DBA started when I joined a B2B direct mail house.

As someone with Aspergers the idea that data could predict how people would behave was something I found fascinating and frankly a bit of a life line. I got a job in an advertising agency and my data analysis skills and tilt towards things mathematical turned out to be useful.

After writing a system in Access to track suspects, prospects and customers in response to direct mail campaigns and reverse engineering a few ad agency systems I was sent on the SQL6.5 courses (both of them)!

From there I joined a small documentation company with a thriving web content management arm and of course all those things were backed by SQL databases (except the one backed by a case sensitive SyBase DB:crazy:). As the CMS market was imature I spent a lot of time reverse engineering the various CMSs with a view to being able to out-perform out-of-the-box code or integrating them with MS Word to facilitate content authoring. I also discovered SQLServerCentral while working there and the rest, as they say, is history.