Hi,
In the past few weeks, after installing a cctv video recorder/server to my network, by a company called Dedicated Micros, I started to get data corruption to my tables. The unit, a Digital Sprite 2, is designed to record to it's hard drive (tivo-style) all the survaillence cameras and allow me to access the live and recorded video over the LAN or Internet. It's a pretty cool system, EXCEPT for the disaster it cause me.
There was TEXT fragments within numeric fields, unintelligible data scattered throughout and large numeric values replacing my primary keys as well as many fields. What a mess. I worked repeatedly night after night fixing all the tables. And each day that passed, the corruption kept occuring.

I had a lot of sleepless nights trying to figure out the cause of the data corruption, until it finally dawned on me, that the problem started just after I installed this unit. Now I've stopped using the unit and my corruption troubles went away. I'm really happy to solve this problem but I have to ask if anyone has ever had a similar experience? The network was probably overloaded by the large amount of video data pumped out by this unit and it caused all the scrambling of data in my tables. I asked the company about it, on their bulletin board, and their tech said he's never heard this before, but said it may be their viewing software or I can reduce the bandwidth output from the server. I'll never trust the unit to keep it within the same network again.

So my questions are: Can network overload cause tables to get corrupted?
Or is it likely that the viewing software was able to affect the tables? I thought data packets on a network know where they supposed to go... or is it the same idea as when a web server get overloaded by hackers to cause it to crash? I'm curious to know if file-server type databases are that fragile? Or do you think this can occur on a sql-server database? And finally has this ever happened to anyone else?
Thanks,
Allen