Software guru, Inc

SQL Server is a great product that many clients begin using when they want to automate a lot of work previously done in Excel and Access.   People are amazed at the ease and speed at which SQL handles incredible volumes of data that would bring Excel to its knees.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of Excel functions for which there are no equivalent functions in Transact-SQL, and which are very hard to write in t-SQL.  The answer, of course, is write them in SQL CLR, a .Net assembly callable from SQL Server as an extended stored procedure.  But who has time to write Accrual and BondInt functions, or string functions?  The people at WestClinTech do.  

While the "art" of being a DBA is something that's often very application specific there are some universal optimizations that can be done to almost any SQL Server.   While tailored to MS SQL Server, these optimizations are generally valid for most RDBMS.