Periodic restart plusses and minuses?

I'd been listening with a moderate amount of amusement, but it's now getting out of hand ... (9iR2 & W2K)

One of the local DBAs has his heart set on nightly shutdowns to do cold backups. Another DBA wants to go for online backups. (Archive logging is up and active.)

The debate has gone all over silly territory and back and is now at: "Shutting down the database will waste all the automatic tuning benefits achieved from the system finding stability in the cache, etc.. It can take hours, even months to get the system stable."

Does anyone have pointers to documents, white papers, books, web sites, metalink note, etc. that I can drop on their desks to move them off this 'shutdown detunes the database' discussion?

Due to politics, I will not provide an opinion or even make a supportable statement in either direction. This needs to be an external (to me) reference, and preferrably not an unsupported anecdote.

(Once they're over this, I hope the discussion can get back to a pure business benefits discussion!)

Thanks in Advance for helping control the local noise pollution! /Hans Received on Tue Oct 05 2004 - 23:36:58 CDT