Excellent article. I must admit I'd be pretty OK and on top of things. However I am still printing you article and pinning it to my wall as a 'little reminder' not to be complacent. We use SecureWord for passwords and Foglight and Spotlight for monitoring. These tools can make you lazy though. When I inherited the DBA role, I found every single connection used sa with a blank password. We are now fully SOX compliant with database roles in place etc. Having said all that I sat the 70-228 exam and failed. No score for section 1 and around 75% correct on all other sections. The exam crashed after 20 minutes into it. Another story. Got no resit and all that. Even though I failed the exam, I personally rate myself as a very proactive and technically strong DBA. Thanks again. Derek