<p>I am a developer.  An architect on good days.  Somehow I find myself also being the DBA for my small company.  My background is fair in the DB arts but I have never been a full fledged DBA.  My question is what do I have to do to ensure a realiable and reasonably functional database environment with as little actual effort as possible?</p>

<p>I am sure that I need to make sure that backups are being performed and that is being done.  That is an easy one.  What else should I be doing on a consistant basis?  </p>

I would suggest:
A script to quickly restore the latest backup of a database, in case it gets corrupted
What kind of backups are you doing?  Full backups each day, or incremental every hour, etc?
Some scripts to create new users and grant them basic access.
However, the number one suggestion is to limit as much as possible the power other users have, this will greatly reduce the chance of stuff getting badly messed up.  Servers that have everyone as an sa tend to get screwed up quicker than servers that are locked down.