State of the art self healing and self protection in DBMS
SQL Server has Automatic Page Repair During a Database Mirroring Session in 2008+. Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

A database mirroring partner tries to automatically recover from
corrupted pages on the mirror database by resolving certain types of
errors that prevent reading a data page. The partner that is unable to
read a page requests a fresh copy from the other partner. If this
request succeeds, the unreadable page is replaced by the copy, which
usually resolves the error.

I guess you could include the repair mechanisms of DBCC CHECKDB under the self-healing banner and Page Checksums under self-protection. Clustering, mirroring and the new HADRON features in SQL Server 2012 are arguably relevant topics also.