>>I could reply with your M.O. ("why are you asking me which database they're using? Make an assertion and show some proof and we'll discuss it"). <s>

If if used SQL Server I'd certainly listen- unless it involved NULLs and change management. ;-) Nah, I'd still listen. ;-) LAMP or Oracle? Lets just say that if you have chest pain, you don't seek advice from an Orthopedic surgeon- and the Orthopedic surgeon would not take that personally. ;-)

>>It's my understanding (I don't have proof, so I'll stand corrected if I'm wrong) that they're using Oracle. I actually cannot talk in detail about it, but last year I briefly did some contract work for one of the major health players and I believe there was some talk in migrating some major DB work from Oracle to SQL Server. However, those efforts were delayed, due mainly to challenges in documenting the functionality of the heavily patched legacy system.

Lots of things I can't talk about ;-) but I can confirm that SQL Server is big in many parts of healthcare outside the payers.

>>SQL Server and SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse scale just as well as Oracle - and you can have badly architected solutions in both technologies.

IMO this isn't going to be a database issue: the reported online errors look like poorly qualified overloaded web service flakiness to me. Certainly there was far too much extraneous js for assets that weren't even there, but they sorted that very quickly and apparently added hardware.