I have a test box. Actually, have one at work and one at home. Trust me, I blow them up regularly. Ended up with a test of CTE behavior causing the tempdb to use up the whole disk drive (it grew to over 200 Gig), just last week.

But, for example, when I recently took a Brainbench DBA test, a huge number of questions were about sqlcmd, which I've never had a use for, so didn't know anything about. Never would have even bothered to learn about it, but now I'm going to look into it and see what it's really good for.

That's why I want to mess around with certs. I would never have thought of playing with a command-line interface for SQL on my own. I pretty much dropped command-line interfaces for most of my computing when Windows 95 came out. I can still write .BAT files pretty well (too many years of DOS, though they were a long time ago), but I don't see much need for that kind of thing these days.

After seeing that on the test, and after reading many entries here, I have to ask myself, "how much else is there that I should know about but don't?" I can get the job done with T-SQL. I can tune the heck out of queries if given a little time. I can design and build a database that automates whole departments of a small/medium business. But what don't I know that might be tripping me up?

Another example is I never played with SQL 2005 synonyms until yesterday. I'd heard of them, but never used/created one. They definitely are convenient. But what are all the ramifications of using them? I don't have the faintest clue. But I intend to find out!