We've all seen eBay, it's not exactly a sophisticated site...hell, they
don't even accept online payments of fees! Big site, but not
sophisticated. Given the amount of code in Oracle's system devoted to not
allowing db corruptions to happen, I find it hard to believe this wasn't
something along the lines of a disk failure that they were caught off
guard by (i.e. they didn't have a replicated copy of the db).
Also, to those who claim that a db corruption is non-fixable, I point to
the extensive roll-forward features in Oracle. You really can take last
week's db and roll it forward to its latest state. Unless, of course, the
failure trashed the transaction log. On all the replicated servers....
-s