Oracle screws up Sun host

We are running two Oracle DB (both 8.1.7) on the same host (Sun E3500/Solaris 7). The first is small and stable and is never changed in its structure (it is a commercial product) - it should run 24x7. The second one is "big" (60 GB Data + Indexes), is being changed almost constantly and runs PL/SQL jobs lasting many hours (Data Mining operations). This second DB produces about 3 ORA-00600 errors a week and at times, it MUST be shut down (because of runaway processes, for example). Normally, shutting down the "big" DB (the instance) is tolerable.

But if it must be shut down due to a problem, if often can't be. Using "shutdown immediate" goes as far as closing the DB, but then, the process of shutting down the DB hangs. If after a while I interrupt the process with Control-C, I get the SQL prompt but I am out of business (disconnected). Nothing more can be done with the DB, since I can't even connect ("instance is down"). Then I notice that there are still one or more Oracle background processes running, which I have to kill at the OS command line. Then I am still unable to connect. As a last effort, I remove the file $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/lk<SID-NAME>, which does not help either. Somehow the host is crewed up at this point, and the only chance I have to get things fixed is to restart the whole host.

This is a shame since this is not windows and there should be a way of cleaning up things without having to restart the host. Restarting the host is not tolerable (it runs the 1st 24x7 DB and an Intranet Server, and it is a NIS Master).

So your advice will be to separate the DBs. We are actually planing exactly that, the new server hardware is being ordered. But my question still remains, how to let the other instances untouched when one of them goes nuts. >>The new server will hold several instances<< Hm.

Any clue?

Rick Denoire Received on Mon Apr 21 2003 - 14:20:59 CDT