I agree, this does tend to depend in what shape your infrastructure is in to begin with. Automated morning reporting on nightly backup routine status, errorlog checking, failed jobs, blocked or blocking processes, phyical disk alerts, etc. goes along way here to extend this number of servers a DBA can easily handle, at least it does for me anyway. Also, now with the release of SQL 2008 the DBA now has at his disposal two new features known as CMS (Central Management Servers) and PBM (Policy Based Management) that allow the DBA to deal with and maintain multiple db servers as a collective unit or group. Instead of having to deal with each of them individually. But of course, you need to get all of this in place first, and that can take some time to do. Not to mention that you might have to put out some major fires beforehand and get your infrastructure under control even before implementing automation and central management. However, the nice thing about this needed front work though is once you got it setup and organized once, then you are golden. Your daily admiistrator life immediately starts to get better, trust me. Adding servers to this mix after that point is a piece of cake. It is definitely worth the effort IMHO. It just all depends on what shape your production db servers are in and this tends to varies widely from company to company in my past experience. 🙂 I have seen some DBA's that have not got the 10 db servers that they are reponsible for organized and automated, and they end up chasing their tails all day long never really getting much accomplished. Then I have seen other DBA's that got 50+ db servers nice and automated, centralized, and organized and manage them quite well, with plenty of time to spare....and not to mention what your boss will think come evaluation time...