How to gracefully kill background tasks

When you use the Oracle PIPE driver and your foreground process running IAP or SQLPLUS aborts due to the user terminating his connection to the system, the background ORACLE shadow process exits gracefully.

The same is not true when running the FAST driver. These background tasks just sit there and consume shared memory and other resources.

Another system administrator has created a script that will look for these processes and kill them. This process also releases the shared memory segments and semaphores that were allocated.

I was told by a person fairly familar with ORACLE that it was very bad to kill these background tasks as you can lock out portions of the database because ORACLE was not given the chance to release temporary space used when building queries.

Given all of this:

1. How DO I kill these jobs?
2. Is the point of locking out portions of the database just rubbish?

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Barry A. Suskind                  Internet:   suskind%edoras_at_mdcbbs.com
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