Clive, I didn't say I had no Real World experience. I said I had no professional experience. Professional = Paid official job title.

My father was a computer programmer, the original punch-card kind. I grew up around computers as they were coming into their own and becoming home computers. I learned from scratch how to program in Assembly, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol and Lotus 1-2-3. I learned from scratch how to put the pieces together and make a system work. I used Gopher and Archie & learned Basic on the Apple II E. And my dad wouldn't let us use the state of the art Commodore 64 he bought unless we learned how to treat it properly.

"A computer is NOT a toy," he told us.

Part of the reason I became a DBA was because I loved doing all this stuff on the side. I figured if I could do it for myself, there wasn't any reason I shouldn't get paid for it. The problem was convincing everyone who got burned in the Tech Bust that I wasn't blowing smoke and I actually knew my way around computers. That's why I put so much work into learning the relational database stuff.

Nadeem, the MCDBA is soon to be an out of date cert. Look at one of my posts above and you'll see a URL link to Microsoft detailing the newest set of SQL Server certs. I really recommend those instead of the MCDBA, unless you're still on a SQL Server 2000 system and need them for your PDS Review.

And I still want to know what you're waiting for from your friend. @=) I'd like to see if it's something the group here can help you with.