Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Oracle /etc/init.d scripts should use shutdown immediate

I'm not sure of what the implications are of doing shutdown immediate vs. the normal procedure.

However, by putting in svc -d /service/myservicename
in the /etc/init.d script, Oracle always shuts down just fine for me. That may be a more attractive option.

If you don't use daemontools, you could do the same thing with runlevels (ie, telinit 3 if your /etc/inittab is set to run Aolserver at runlevel 4)

I'm not sure of what the implications are of doing shutdown immediate vs. the normal procedure.

There's a couple of kinds of shutdown:

  • Normal : wait for clients to disconnect before completing a shutdown. This is a clean shutdown
  • Transactional : wait for clients to complete any pending transactions before completing a shutdown. This is also clean
  • Immediate : terminate and rollback and pending transactions. This is also clean
  • Abort : shutdown now. This is an unclean shutdown, and will require "instance recovery" (cleanup of the mess any previous transactions have made) next time Oracle is started.
Andy is right that life is happier if you shutdown the db clients before you shutdown the database. If you have just a few clients, that's usually not too big of an issue.