Yes, it's expensive. Yes, they'd need a whole extra dba or two. No
excuse for a publicly traded company not to invest the $$ protecting their
bread and butter...
Try this on for size:
GM: "Dear customer. Yesterday you placed an order with one of our
dealers (we can't remember which one). Our order processing system lost
the order because we were too stupid/cheap/lazy to buy an extra db server
and cluster them. We've lost all the orders from the past 3 days".
Guaranteed shareholder lawsuit.
-s
On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Koen Holtman wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Steve Dossick wrote:
>
> > Given that one of the features of the high-end sun hardware they have (and
> > an available option on Oracle) is true server clustering/redundancy, why
> > didn't they just buy an identical machine and have it running as a hot
> > spare? God knows they have the $$.
>
> The Online reporter article states that they have a "massive corruption of
> the data system". Sounds like a corrupt database, very much a software
> problem. And restoring a corrupt database is one of the more manpower
> intensive things one can think of. I guess that putting back last week's
> backup is not that much of an option for eBay.
>
> I've heard a database vendor explain that their usual support procedure
> for people with a corrupt database is to ask them if they *really really
> really* need the part that is corrupt. If not, they nuke the corrupt
> part. If the part is *really really really* needed, well, this is why the
> support contracts are so expensive.
>
> Throwing redundant hardware at the problem usually gives you two corrupt
> databases in stead of one when the shoe drops.
>
> Koen.
>
>