Been there, done that. There's nothing worse than trying to catch 40 winks in a server room while pulling an all-weekender trying to get corporate servers back online after a crash ready for people to use them monday morning.
It sounds like you inherited a huge steaming pile of [=CENSORED=] from GF with this database. My heart goes out to you.
I can't wait to see what the future holds for FE now we have someone that knows what they're doing at the helm...