RE: ASM crash/question

ASM should cheerfully run without there being any databases present. Unless this is a bug I am unaware of (which is very possible), that is not expected behavior for ASM. What may have happened is that when the system went into maintenance mode, ASM shut down or got into a weird state (or could have been in a weird state due to whatever made ASM get into maintenance mode).  

And if you ever get treated that shabbily by Oracle support, escalate. Ask to speak to a manager, or request a callback by a manager, and put a note in the SR explaining such. Then, when you get the manager, get a second opinion and don't hesitate to say that the original tech was rude and unprofessional. If necessary, get your Oracle sales rep involved. Oracle is expensive enough that there is no excuse for being treated badly by support - everyone has "off" or bad days, but there's a certain level of politeness that every person should be able to muster when speaking with a customer. Or look at it another way - while we may not be able to guarantee *competence* from Oracle support, we should at least be able to guarantee *courtesy*.  

Thanks,

Matt    

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Koivu, Lisa Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 3:34 PM
To: oracle-l
Subject: ASM crash/question  

Hi All,  

I had several non-clustered databases crash simultaneously last week, all on the same host.  

The moments before the crash, I had mentioned to the sysadmin that I could not log in to the CDE. He said it had gone into maintenance mode. Once it was reset, all databases crashed and ASM hung up. (Has this happened to anyone before?)  

I could not restart the databases, as they could not see the datafiles in ASM.

I could not shut down ASM, as it thought databases were still connected.

I had to crash ASM with a shutdown abort (boy did that make me nervous)

Once I did that, ASM came up without an issue and so did all the databases.  

Oracle Support very rudely told me that if ASM doesn't have any databases communicating to it, or if it can't communicate with the databases it services, it will eventually time out and crash. This very curt and discourteous person informed me that "that's the way ASM works" and there was no documentation he could share with me to educate me on this issue.  

My point was that ASM is a service. Why would it just die when nothing was connected? What if just one database had crashed and couldn't come up? I'd then have to crash the other databases this ASM instance services in order to bring the crashed database up. This will fly like a box of rocks when I ask to put this into production.  

I was also appalled at how rude this person from support was. I actually hope I get an email inviting me to "please take a survey" because I would actually fill one out this time. (It was all I could do to not tell him he was being a jerk about the whole thing.)  

If anyone has encountered this scenario, is willing to educate me, or can direct me to any documentation, etc. I would greatly appreciate it.  

Lisa Koivu

Oracle Database Administrator

desk: 407-903-4691

cell: 954-683-4459  

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