I actually majored in psychology but did take some logic courses and such. I enjoyed working with computers though so worked in the laboratories while in school. After I finished I ended up doing some administrative assistant work for a large hospital and streamlined some of their processes with spreadsheets and such. I was asked at one point to work in the I.S. department doing support. From there I worked my way up to a systems management position in medical records and QA/UR managing a small network and a couple of databases. I went from there to another hospital systems as an analyst and ended up being the "go to" person when projects were running behind or had hit some kind of wall. We started getting a lot of databases in (SQL Server and Oracle) and they needed someone to manage them so I was asked to take them over. From there I ended up doing consulting work for a year doing Oracle installations/patches/ troubleshooting - mostly in nuclear power and large manufacturing industries. I didn't like the travel though which was much more than I was originally told it will be (which usually happens - esp w/ a smaller company) because of turnover so I moved on to Cintas.

As far as the developer market, someone else would probably be a better person to ask. I have done some development but haven't worked as a developer and so don't watch that market. I do know that the market for Oracle DBA's is great. I've worked w/ both SQL Server and with Oracle and I prefer to work with Oracle. The projects are usually more interesting because they are usually more involved and higher-scale projects. At the same time, a lot of shops have many more SQL Servers just because they are so cheap to deploy and as long as the application is well written, don't require a lot of maintenence. There have been a number of times where SQL Server was obviously a better choice because the system was small, not very mission critical, etc.. Any other time though I definately push for Oracle.

As far as the future of the DBMS market, I think it looks great all the way around. The market clearly continues to grow and the technology continues to grow as well to meet the increasing demands for storage, speed and flexibility. I think anyone who has good skills in this area isn't going to be hurting to find employment.

Joe