I'm an Oracle DBA at a relatively small company (healthcare ASP - give or take 50 employees)

One of the things that I've found is that as long as I can justify doing what I want to do, they let me do whatever.

For example, I'm in the process of teaching myself Perl. I originally picked it up to re-write a login process for our customers - original screen was crashing under load.

I've also expanded my (very!) limited Perl boundaries by creating database reporting scripts, maintenance tools, and I'm currently working on a report gatekeeper to help increase security for our reports (got a question out there if anyone minds taking a look...)

So - long story short - if I can justify my intended/expected end-result, and it's not something with a nasty deadline, I've got a significant amount of latitude regarding how I do it...and there's no reason NOT to learn a new language or OS along the way....