January and February are peak times for my company's business; now I can start to focus on new things, here is what I learned during peak and where 2010 will focus:

• Capacity management is the 2nd most important thing dba's do.
• Performance tuning and monitoring is the most important thing (during peak)
• Locking and Blocking is the biggest scale issue i regularly see.
• Mirroring on SQL Server standard edition sucks (especially for geographically disperse sites).
• Mirroring on SQL Server enterprise edition rocks (though the cost factor is prohibitive).
• Informatica is no better an ETL Tool than SSIS
• Oracle and SQL Server are a pain in the ass to make work together (Oracle DBAs are'nt much help either)
• 1 terrabyte of disk space is almost enough !
• Re-indexing and defragging is analogous to politics and religion and DBA's should be barred from discussing the topic
• Encryption is a pain in the ass.
• Surprise - Merge replication actually works and is not near the PIA I thought
• 6gb of RAM is never enough
• Polyserve is not worth the effort
• VM Ware with VMotion is awesome
• VM Ware is a good alternative to Polyserve
• Hyper-V is not there yet
• SQL 2008 R2 licensing sucks
• SQL 2000 is finally no longer meeting the business requirements and we may finally get funding to upgrade the remaining instances !