Database talking to itself?

We've got a pretty good sized DB (400GB) that seems to have gone senile.

Three days ago the SMON process started up and starting using large amounts of CPU and doing some I/O. Soon afterward the LGWR process started doing its thing. Both ran and ran and ran and are still running. We did a shutdown abort, fired it back up and off it went again. It generates about 150MB of rollback information every 3 minutes. It appears to be getting and updating huge numbers of data blocks but I/O counts at the OS level don't seem to verify the numbers in the DB (maybe its updating the same block over and over?).

We can execute most queries against the database and direct sqlldr loads work. Some queries and (we think) all updates block on something.

Oracle claims it must be doing a huge rollback but we are unaware of any transaction that might have been running at the time that would have been of any size. There are no unusual messages being generated during the processing. Oracle claim's we should let it go but haven't been able to provide us any concrete way to identify that it is making any progress.

We're running Oracle 8i 8.1.5.0.0 (I think) under HP-UX 11.00.

I'm about to hit the tapes ... anybody have a clue what might be going on or how we might be able to tell what is going on (and ideally when it might finish)?

tia
Jim Kuschill
VP, MIS
Frequency Marketing, Inc Received on Mon Mar 13 2000 - 00:00:00 CST