Dennis makes an excellent point I’ve completely forgotten about.  The "SIG" (special interest group). I have a MS regional office in my neighborhood and a few years back attended many sql server meeting. They were fantastic. The were once a month run by MS employees in MS office. The meetings were usually a full working demonstration on a particular technology, complete with documentation and working examples!

 The meetings were free and I actually felt they were worth at  least $50 per evening, excellent training. Shortly I got fully pulled into Oracle, so the group has fallen off my radar.

I would suggest searching for MS SIG's in your area. Interesting enough it seems the one in my area is has disbanded. Must have been the 30 pizzas they would provide for the group each month<g>

In my digging around I came across an interesting link; Search the page for sql server
http://www.yukonxml.com/UserGroups/

Stephen,

 

I reluctantly agree with your consultant. At most organizations, SQL Server is becoming too vital to the company to simply be ignored. And despite our best efforts, not all applications will get migrated to Oracle. Experienced Oracle DBAs can bring

-- 
"Oracle error messages being what they are, do not
highlight the correct cause of fault, but will identify
some other error located close to where the real fault lies."