Re: Using Shutdown Immediate

snowden_at_haven.ios.com (Roger Snowden) wrote:

>: Stefan Estus (estus_at_bard.edu) wrote:
>: > I'm writing a cold backup script for our databases and I'm seeking
>: > some advice on shutdown immediate. I would like to ensure that all connections
>: > to the database are closed; thus I have writen a shell script to kill all
>: > user processes. It has been my experience that they don't always die! My
>: > questions is: is it ok to do a shutdown immediate, startup, shutdown normal,
>: > and then start my backup? What are the pros and cons?
 

>If you do a shutdown immediate, you don't have to startup and shutdown
>normal afterward. Shutdown immediate is a clean shutdown, it just kicks
>off the users and rolls back their work before shutting down. If you
>have bogus sessions out there, that don't really represent pending
>transactions, shutdown immediate is cool enough.
 

>Roger

From the DBA guide, chapter 18:

<quote>
Preparing to Take a Full Backup

To guarantee that a database's data files are consistent, always shut down the database in normal priority before making a full database backup; never perform a full database backup after an instance failure or after the database is shut down with immediate or abort priority (that is, using a SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE or SHUTDOWN ABORT statement). In both these cases, the data files are likely not to be consistent with respect to a specific point-in-time. </quote>

Please, after a shutdown immediate, do a startup followed by a clean shutdown (with no options). It is definitely not guaranteed to work any other way.

Thomas Kyte
tkyte_at_us.oracle.com
Oracle Government Received on Sat Aug 12 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST