Don't Use Shutdown Immediate for Full Backup

The manual says not to do a SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE if you are going to do a full cold backup of the database. However SHUTDOWN NORMAL isn't likely to bring the database down since invariably there are sessions hanging. Of course the backup is done in the middle of the night, and I won't be around to kill any sessions. I'm wondering what other people have done. Should I write a script to kill all sessions before the shutdown script runs or what?

Below is the exact text from the manual.

Oracle 7 Server Administrator's Guide (part no 6694-70-1292) from December 1992 on page 18-8 says

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 shutdown 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.

Thank you,

Catherine Cox
catcox_at_aol.com Received on Wed Feb 04 1998 - 00:00:00 CST