[servowire]

I don't remember the exact details, but I once had a DB admin flabbergasted because there was a non-numeric character in a field/row that was numeric. The DB engine crashed upon starting and could not clean it up.

I think it was Oracle.

If I remember correctly we had to get the vendor involved

This happened after an unclean shutdown (power failure). The disk were RAID, but the cache battery was dead so there was some corrupt data written to the disk on block level.

THis could happen too on a kill -9.