Re: shutdown immediate or abort for cold-backup?

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Randy wrote:

> This is not the case! Shutdown abort always presents risk of data loss and
> database corruption. The Oracle server is extremely adept at recovering
> from crashes (which the shutdown abort is), but there is always risk.

I must beg to differ. 'shutdown abort' does not pose the risk of damage to the database, because all committed transactions are, by definition, written successfully out to the online redologs.

On startup, during crash recovery, datafiles are made consistent through Oracle's automatic instance recovery mechanism. I would like to know the exact technical reason that you believe 'shutdown abort' is a risky operation. I maintain that it is perfectly safe, and may be used routinely.

In fact, Oracle Failsafe, Oracle's high-availability cluster solution for Windows, uses ABORT as the default shutdown mode for stopping cluster services.

What's wrong with 'shutdown abort?' If you force a checkpoint prior to 'shutdown abort,' a simple restart of the instance completes much faster than waiting around for 'shutdown immediate' on a busy system. In some cases, it can complete faster by an order of magnitude or more.

--
Jeremiah Wilton
http://www.speakeasy.net/~jwilton