As a graduating college student I believe I am decent with MS-SQL server and I admit I'd have to stop and think on some of the questiosn in the article BUT that being said I am trying to find a replacement for myself at the law offices where I work where we use a commercial management product.  We are currently on our second person.  Our first person we recently just got rid of.  He came to us with experience in MS SQL 7, 8 and 2000 on his Resume --- the SQL 8 should ahve been the first clue but our HR director insisted that this was a typo;  he also had years and years of experience in DBs and everything else.  This small company -- 30 employees or so --- the sole IT guy needs to be a jack of all trades and master of many. 

We hired him, i went home for summer and came back.  over the summer any time when any kind of "advanced query" needed to be made --- advanced meaning anything that required a query with more then a basic inner join he'd call me.  About 2 weeks ago now I'm in my sedimentary petrology class (truth out:  I have a BS in Computer Science, I'm not sure I want to stick to computer science but have an interest in geology so I'm taking some extra classes and looking at option for graduate school) --- somebody comes and tells me "your office is on the phone, they said <<application here>> is down" --- I leave class check my e-mail and the IT person e-mailed me the updates he wanted to run (did he wait for me to check them ?  no!) ---- well, the updates didn't put the right data (not even the right data type) in the fields --- ok, so yes, I realize this is a poorly designed database if it allowed that to happen --- if somebody wants to get some good laughs track me down and I can make your sides hurt with these schemas; but he should have beena ble to figure out you don't put varchar data in a field that has integers in it (even though the datatype on the field is wrong but thats aside the point!) --- crashed our ENTIRE document management, front office managemetn, contact and billing system.  

Now the "fix" was really easy --- granted we had about 1200 items that had to be manually cleaned up and 8500 or so manual but with as much industry experience as this man claimed to have had, he should never have made this.  Much less, I should have been learning from him, not him learning from me.  

to the author:   I very much enjoyed your article.

to everybody else:  if anybody has some free time, as somebody whose going to be job hunting in January, I would very much appreciate any pointers on how to fairly assess my current SQL server skill set.   I think I'm pretty good but that is from the people I am around; I've not had the opportunity to really learn from "experts" -- my internship did not have a DBA, just another developer who knew a little more about databases then the rest and they were coming to me for help so I'd really apprecaite some feedback on figuring out where I stand if anybody would be willing.  You can reach me on AIM as TNGData usually.

--MAL