I just spent almost two years in the UK. One thing I noticed is that the recruiters tend to be very specific about the candidate having **every** skill listed in the requirements. Many of my collegues joked how they lied on their CVs about one or two skills just to get their foot in the door. Couldn't bring myself to try that one...

I returned to New Zealand earlier in the year and found a Perl contract using Sybase for the first time. The fact is, with the exception of a few gotchas, very little is different from using Oracle or MySQL - unless of course, you're calling Stored Procs, or using advanced vendor-specific functionality to eek out the last bit of performance. I think the difference this time round is that the company I contract to advertised directly, so I didn't need to get past the recruitment sentries. Sadly, knowing the syntax of a particular flavour of SQL is more important to some people than actually being able to design queries, or normalise data relationships