Re: What causes "shutdown immediate" to fail?

In article <1vkqa7INNpjp_at_hydra.Helsinki.FI>, karell_at_cs.Helsinki.FI (Esa Karell) writes:
> If "shutdown immediate" fails (just hangs) does it mean
> that there are oracle processes running that ignore
> signals?

In the VMS environment we have found that even though an "immediate" will throw the user out of Oracle they quite often will still have an operating system lock on one or more crucial Oracle files. Normally this has only caused us problems when trying to restart the database but their have been occasions...

We now run a DCL (VMS) script first to logoff (from VMS) all processes that are currently locking any Oracle files (excluding Oracle background processes) AND THEN we do a "shutdown immediate".

>Are there any negative sideeffects on using
> "shutdown abort"?

None encountered so far. We have had quite regular machine crashes in the past (which is a sort of super ABORT I suppose) and once we reboot it simply comes up as usual (takes a little longer) and works fine. One thing I can say from my experience with Oracle databases, they're robust. However, we have gotten into the practice that if we are shutting down using "abort" then once its down we then bring it up in DBA mode and then do a normal shutdown. This guarantees that the database is in a nice clean state before we do our backups. Be careful when taking backups that your database is shutdown cleanly because I don't believe the database "rollforward" type recovery will work from an unclean database backup. I haven't tried this but I really don't want to have to.

> --
>
> Esa Karell karell_at_cs.Helsinki.FI
> Tel. +358-0 513 081 /home

Hope that's of some help to you.

If you hear of any other problems with the various shutdown modes would you please post them as a summary.

Thanks.

Bruce... pihlab_at_cbr.hhcs.gov.au Received on Wed Jun 16 1993 - 00:35:09 CEST