Re: shutdown immediate hangs

Karen,

Just a couple of things.

The original poster was talking about doing cold backup. Which means that if cold backup is well planned as it should be, it is generally done at predetermined time that even users are also aware of. With the exception of very few open sessions (Presumably because users forgot to log off), it should not be an issue that a loss of important data may occur if a database is shutdown.

I agree with Howard in his concept of shutdown abort and it's uses. Shutdown abort or not to Shutdown abort is something that may have been blown out of proportion. I personally have not seen any *warning* from Oracle to suggest that Shutdown Abort is bad. On the other hand...they have provided this option to begin with. The most important thing to be aware of is if data has not been lost during shutdown. Technically, Shutdown immediate is same as Shutdown abort -> startup -> Shutdown normal as far as the rollback of uncommitted transactions is concerned. Uncommitted transactions are hosed in either case. An argument may be valid for taking 3 steps vs 1. It also is a perosonal choice of a DBA as to how he/she wants to perform a particular task.

If you look at the alert log file, shutdown abort immediately kills all processes without applying the redo logs...this is the key here. It will do that at next startup provided the redo log has not been hosed. Chances of that happening are slim to none if Shutdown abort -> startup -> shutdown normal are issued right after one another in a script. Shutdown immediate on the other hand will apply redo logs before shutdown. I use shutdown abort/startup/shutdown normal all the time in a script for cold backups and never had any issues at recover time.

Killing sessions via a script before shutdown is an overkill which may be equivalent of trying to shutdown all services manually before shutting down an NT server.

My two cents.
/Rauf Sarwar Received on Sun Sep 22 2002 - 01:37:20 CDT