RE: Mysterious failure!

Sounds like a semaphore issue

I believe when you use the kill or abort a process the semaphores don't get cleaned up. Though I'm a little surprised the db would start back up if it was indeed a semaphore issue.

Chris Taylor
Sr. Oracle DBA
Ingram Barge Company
Nashville, TN 37205
Office: 615-517-3355
Cell: 615-354-4799
Email: chris.taylor_at_ingrambarge.com

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Mason Loring Bliss Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 10:19 AM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Mysterious failure!

Hi, all.

We had an event the other night that's baffling, and I'm hoping someone on
here can help me figure out how to shed more light on it.

Specifically, our Oracle (10G, 10.2.0.1.0, SLES 9 with Linux 2.6.5-7.267-bigsmp)
became unresponsive. Tomcat couldn't talk to it. sqlplus and rman were both
unable to connect to it.

After poking at it for a bit, we killed the Oracle processes. This is something I should probably be able to figure out, but after this, I was still unable to run rman to open the database back up. I'm guessing there's
some sort of state information somewhere that became obsolete when we killed
the processes... Killing them required a KILL signal - TERM didn't do it.

Finally we rebooted the server, and with that done, I was able to launch rman and use it to recover and restart the database.

My big question is, is there any way I can find some trace of what happened?
I'd love to know what Oracle thinks was going on while it was unresponsive.
In digging through admin files (files in adump, bdump, cdump, udump from the
data in question) I'm not seeing anything obvious, but I'm not 100% sure what
to look for. I see some files that were last updated around the time we believe the failure occurred, but I see nothing suspicious in them.

Thanks in advance!

--

    Mason Loring Bliss     mason_at_blisses.org       They also surf who
awake ? sleep : dream;     http://blisses.org/     only stand on waves.

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Nov 29 2007 - 10:36:57 CST