Yes and no. We can go into the semantics about whether or not a user requires them or not. Really it's a point that there's no reason to argue about. Every login has access to master. Even if I take the appropriate steps and revoke public's access to everything but the two objects required in master, the login still has access to master.

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The fact is that I'm a verbose trainer and author <g> and I am a big believer in teaching somebody "how to fish."

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I'm a big believer in how to fish as well, but I'm also very keenly aware that there are a lot of junior DBAs who need more foundational knowledge before an explanation beyond "SELECT @@VERSION works for every login" is going to be understandable. Having dealt with this issue recently in a few cases with a couple of different organizations, this unfortunately is reality. They first have to get past the difference between logins and users before they can understand the details of what the guest account means in master and tempdb.

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3. This one is most important: why do I either have to act like a "junior DBA" or be telepathic enough to guess the outcome of all these semantic points just to answer a simple question like this? The point is that the question does *not* reliably differentiate between a knowledgable DBA and a rookie, not because of the semantics, but because of wording that is not clear enough.

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I think a lot is being read into what these questions are supposed to represent. We'd need to get a reading from Brian, Andy, or Steve, but from my perspective they weren't intended to be "certification hardened" questions so much as ones to spur on conversations like this one... thereby leading to a better understanding for anyone who jumps in and participates.

K. Brian Kelley

http://www.truthsolutions.com/

Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring

http://www.netimpress.com/shop/product.asp?ProductID=NI-SQL1