Re: ideas needed to track down a mysterious problem

On 13 May 2007 01:36:44 -0700, prunoki <hegyvari_at_ardents.hu> wrote:

>Right now I started to establish a protocol, organizing the todo-s
>into steps which should be taken before restarting. It is something
>like:
>
>- examine the active sessions
>- examine the logs
>- check the CPU and disk resources
>- etc
>
>Any ideas what to add to this list? Any queries that might help
>finding out what happens? Or better, any ideas why this might happen?
>What does the fact that a system state dump could not be taken mean to
>you? From my point of view this could well be an Oracle bug, or
>anything.

8i is desupported, Oracle still has extended support for 8i, but only for 8.1.7.4. You should upgrade to 8.1.7.4 asap.

Other than that you shouldn't resort to Microsoft tactics. Just restarting the system isn't going to help you out. The *very first* thing you should do is examine the alert log. You should above all look for a database which can't archive it's redo logs anymore, as this is one of the primary causes why a database becomes 'hung'
Then you should check 'what it is waiting for'. If you can connect, installing statspack might be handy, because it will provide all relevant information.
Install it using $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/spcreate, run statspack.snap two times within 15 minutes, and run
$ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/spreport.sql to get relevant output.

It is most likely a hung archiver and NOT an Oracle bug.

-- 
Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA