Confirming Database is Down on Windows

Hi All,

On Unix if I want to confirm that a database is shutdown I can run a ps and check for absense of smon/pmon etc. and also run ipcs if really paranoid.

On Windows the Windows Service might be running even though the database is down so I can't check that. Simply connecting doesn't confirm it either: I get an "ORA-01034 ORACLE not available" if I try to connect (even as SYS) to a database doing a transactional shutdown, even though the users who are doing the transactions are still merrily working away.

Is there anyway to make sure the database is down? (without deliberately killing the Windows Service to enforce it!) The best I can come up with is to check for a shutdown message in the alert log, but not sure if this covers a crash that takes out the instance rather than the service. NB: I don't want to check if the instance is UP - so a "SELECT 1 FROM DUAL" type method doesn't help me - I want to check if it is DOWN.... (and UP isn't exactly opposite to DOWN in this context!)

Thank you for any tips!

Charlotte

PS. This is on 9i       

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