I spent 6-7 years doing Perl professionally 100% of the time. At my current job, Perl is 1-20% of what I do. The rest of my time is spent training to be an MS SQL Server DBA. I am happy for the switch. I always believed that more and more of what I and others were doing in Perl was due to not having a powerful database available.

Admittedly Perl and Oracle is more of a bread-and-butter fit in terms of jobs, but I am gaining more and more respect for the Windows technologies and thought that taking a job with paid training to learn SQL Server was a great way to get my feet wet with the "other way" of doing things.