I just finished watching a seminar on becoming a DBA. It seems a lot of times people get drafted into the DBA role. This is not a bad thing always. The DBA is a good career path. But I also saw a lot of potential for DBA pain.You need to keep your boss happy in any job. But the DBA must keep the user happy. Otherwise you will suffer. There are ways to set up your environment to increase the chance of succes.
Have a sandbox to try out new technologies. Put your development database on a separate physical machine. Be ready to restore a production backup to the test environment. And have a staging database that mimics everything you see in production if your project has the cash.
