hanging shutdowns

Hello all,

I have a small dilemma I need to resolve. We have several large databases that do not shutdown quickly due to active processes (usually AQ stuff but not always) and this has caused problems with cold backups in the past. (I'd prefer to stop the colds entirely, but have not yet won that debate.)

Another dba wrote a script which first kills all unix processes connecting to the database, connects to the database to kill all sessions except the sys connections and then issues a shutdown immediate. We now have another instance on the server so I need to modify the scripts for the new instance but I'm not comfortable with the current approach.

Given that I need to have something that works by next Sunday morning, what is the best way to structure these scripts? Continue to kill everything? Issue a shutdown, find the remaining active transactions and kill only them? Issue a shutdown abort, restart, shutdown cleanly and then run the backups? I've seen discussions on this subject in the past, I'm just wondering if there's any new solutions or concerns on the subject.

Databases are Oracle 9.2.0.6 on HP-UX approximately a TB in size. (some slightly bigger, some slightly smaller)

recommendations appreciated ...

Robyn

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l