This just seems like a bad idea and the thing about SOX -- its very open to interpetation. I've been through a SOX audit and did not loose my local admin permissions. The auditors did try to get us to implement data changes and select audit on all data (of course they are a reseller of such software), but we were able to show this request was not necessary. I would agrue against it and try to get your senior management to back you on it. The service account basically requires local admin access (there are several KB articles that document this, especially in a cluster). Also there is big difference in running SQL on a Windows server and running Oracle or Informix on a UNIX server. My team supports both and guess what -- we don't need root access on UNIX. The DBMS is somewhat OS agnostic and one of our UNIX servers reached an uptime of 360 days. As for SQL it is very tied to Windows and guess what -- sometimes you need to reboot or recycle the services and this requires admin access.