Re: shutdown immediate or abort for cold-backup?

On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Howard J. Rogers wrote:

> Conceivably, it would be possible to abort whilst a checkpoint is actually
> being issued, and CKPT has only got round to timestamping half the data
> files... that would indeed require media recovery, but once again, since all
> requisite redo is available in the current redo log, it wouldn't be a big
> deal.

So, has anybody ever seen this in practice?

I assume that, were this to occur, Oracle would complain that datafiles were in need of recovery and fail to start. Hopefully, the problem could be resolved by a simple "recover automatic database" since the redo would be available (sans additional archived redo).

It seems to me, however, that this is the ONLY case where a shutdown abort would result in an (immediately) unusable database assuming that the media is intact.

If no one has ever actually seen this in the real world, then SMON must have some way of automatically "rolling back" an in-flight checkpoint.

I myself use shutdown aborts in the cluster management software for my systems, and I read earlier in this thread that Oracle-supplied HA scripts do the same. However, I would be hesitant to do a nightly shutdown abort for fear of a checkpoint problem.

It would be interesting to have a definitive answer to this question. It's a shame that Oracle developers don't really seem to participate in this forum.

    / Charles J. Fisher              | A bad design with a good presentation /
   /  cfisher_at_rhadmin.org            | is doomed eventually. A good design  /
  /   http://rhadmin.org             | with bad presentation is doomed     /
 /                                   | immediately.                       /
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