Crucial's M225 (I own the 128GB version) 1711 firmware had significant bugs and was quickly yanked. In order to upgrade to the latest 1819 you have to downgrade back to 1571.

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

Seems as if most consumer SSD products are still a bit in the "beta" stage.

No, not really.

RAID-5 allows for disk failure via distributed block parity. ECC recovers single bit error.

The "Memory RAID" design should prevent a larger issue (multi-bit/DIMM failure/etc. that ECC cannot prevent) from taking the whole system out.

I would imagine that ECC memory would be used in conjunction with higher-level striping or mirroring to prevent and recover from both failures.

RAM is dirt cheap and most server systems support significantly more RAM than most people bother to install. For critical systems, ECC works but that doesn't prevent everything (double bit errors etc.). Is it time for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive DIMMs? Many HA servers now support Memory Mirroring (aka RAID-1 http://www.rackaid.com/resources/rackaid-blog/server-dysfunction/memory_mirroring_to_the_rescue/) but should there be more research into different RAID levels for memory (RAID5-6, 10, etc?)

No worries -- the concept is right :)

"Obviously the best way of accomplishing such a database is to denormalize any value that might be null"

That's normalizing -- the table in this example is de-normalized