Wouldn't performing dry-run with a checklist of actions have kept this from happening or at least alerted them to the deficiencies?
This is the world we’ve got today.
This company was screwed as soon as they did business with Oracle. A company whose entire business model is making things as inscrutable as possible so you'll pay them more money in support contracts.
So the question is, why did the company not think of testing their backups, and generally doing a full validation of the system before committing to it for months and millions of $ in business? What sort of workflows, processes and culture in the company allowed this to happen? Probably the cheap sort.
This is in fact the very thing that a good agile devops shop will prevent by not relying on Oracle to handle it for them. That's why the comment I was replying too looked kneejerk and not the result of having read the article to me.