Craig - thanks for the insight. I've thought perhaps that BI might be a good avenue to take, but unfortunately my problem right now is that I know very little about what any of these positions REALLY do day-to-day, so deciding which path to take has proven difficult. I've read a little about the BI job online, and it seems more people oriented than SQL oriented. I think I would prefer something more data-oriented, than people oriented, but i have very little to base this feeling on.

Jeff - thank you for the input on the salary side of things. I'm sorry I didn't communicate this better in my original post, but I'm not expecting to walk into a career as a novice and make 6 figures, and i realize i have no marketable IT skills right now. If I enjoyed the career, I'd be happy making less than 6 figures long-term, but I would like to at least be in the 80 to 90 range at some point down the road when I'm very experienced. I'm pretty much planning on taking a 50% pay cut to switch careers, but I have always known my current job wasn't for me, so I've kept my lifestyle trimmed to within half of my pay....thank God, or else I'd be really screwed;)

So, to kind of add on to my original post, I keep gravitating back to the idea of working with SQL, which is funny since i know only slightly more than my dog about it. I guess where the interest comes from is that at my last job, I had to work closely with a data analyst, and I kind of saw a little bit of what they did. Also, since I've always enjoyed using Excel formulas to manipulate large .csv files and turn them into something usable for the average user, I thought that I might enjoy SQL. I loved (and still love) being the guy that could work magic with Excel, and I enjoyed being a resource for others in my office on Excel as well. I'm going to really give away my nerdiness now, but what I REALLY loved, was needing to come up with a formula that would do x with the data, and then having the challenge of trying to figure out how to do it and make it work....I built an entire sales tracker for my current employer on excel in my free time, more or less because i just really enjoy that kind of stuff...that's how nerdy i am;). I think that's why I've enjoyed learning HTML/CSS, and I think that's why i think i might like working with SQL as a career. Does that sound like a reasonable conclusion to come to?