A DBA I know changed jobs to a new company in the fall of last year. He is a tuner and a good guy that gets involved with how things run and fixes them. He does DB2, SQL Server and Oracle. The company he went to work for is a well known retailer. Their Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday last year was a fire fighting exercise to keep the systems up and running. He told me that he has never seen anything like it. This year they didn't have any problems at all. He spent the last 12 months tuning all of their systems that experienced problems over last years holidays. He emailed me yesterday saying that their systems ran better than they ever had and he was getting a ton of pats on the back for a job well done.