Thanks for the replies!

I have enjoyed the "DBA" type things that I have done so far.. Particularly a Datawarehouse project that I was involved in.. It was just me and a developer.. It was quite a hobknob of products. Sybase 11.2 on NT 4 on the back end, O'Reilly Web Site Pro, and then later IIS 4 on NT with Cognos Web Query and Intersolv drivers on the app server.. Took some doing to get it all running... Once it was running it was really rewarding to see the sales folks and exec's faces when they started using it..

One of the things that I really liked was that it seemed to me you are closer to the business itself.. You get to see more how things work internally.. and you feel like what you are doing is really helping the company.. More apparent business value.. Building the network, it seems is viewed more as "sunk cost" rather than a "business enabler". We know better.. that you have to have the network, and it better be fast and reliable.. but its more of a "given" these days..

The other thing that I enjoyed was doing some performance tuning on an Oracle system.. Was able to bring the query time down from over a minute to 10 sec.. Got the cache hit ratio up to 98%.. Thanks to Niemiec's book...

Well, either you have convinced me or helped me convince myself.. either way I appreciate your posts.. I'm sure I'll see you all around here in the future.. I have a lot of work to do in the meantime to "get up to speed".

Best regards,

Mark