Sean,

I absolutely agree with your comments; however the need for as many DBA at any given site can be and has drastically been reduced.

We have well over 130 database servers at my site and for 18 months I was the sole DBA. If this was SQL 6.5 or heaven forbid an Oracle site I'm sure you would need 10 DBAs. Today’s SQL Server is much easier to manage, you still need and want the professional DBA guarding the data and managing but you don't need that team like you once did.

I think the biggest impact that has allowed easier DBA maintenance has been the advances in hardware and the O/S. I've clustered Data Generals and Compaq under NT 4.0 and SQL 6.5, believe me the days and time spent preparing the SQL environment have come along way. Today I can crank out new cluster sites in a fraction of the time. Most of our environments have been built by Window administrators who follow a documented plan. 

IT Managers be forewarned - Just because it appears easy, has nice GUI, and you know how to use a mouse doesn't mean you want your first tier support specialist playing DBA. What are you going to tell that director of sales when they want their 2nd quarter results off that database that just went suspect.

I've walked into sites (E & something) where they've completely corrupted their database, but that was okay because they can use last nights backup, only to discover that they had hadn't purchase database backup option of that software and of course open files don’t get picked up, and heaven forbid had you looked at those reports you would have known that 2 years ago.

But go ahead and try to the job without us. It's only your career on the line.

By the way - the knuckleheads here finally wised up and allow me to hire a backup DBA, because had I walked out the door, the keys to the kingdom would have followed.    

Zach