• I'll second Steve's article, but also point out this is valuable at the other end of the scale - the tiny shop where you have one, maybe two people in IT running the whole show. The "scale" in this case isn't the numbers of servers and instances, but rather where you're the one being the DBA, the developer, the desktop support, procurement and so on...and so on...and so on... .

    I wear A LOT of hats in my current job simply because it's me and the boss. We're part of a major multi-national corporation, but our little office is something of an autonomous unit (way too long to explain) so we're basically the IT department, and I do most of it because my boss is heavily involved in finances as well.

    I've been using the incredible brain trust we have lying around here to learn how to automate many tasks and monitor our systems. That's freed me up to create or procure solutions for other departments to help centralize and automate their processes, and it gives me time to accomplish other facets of my job.

    Sometimes we hear "big" when someone says "scale" and that isn't necessarily the case.

    ____________
    Just my $0.02 from over here in the cheap seats of the peanut gallery - please adjust for inflation and/or your local currency.