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

The implications of the different flavors of shutdown are explained pretty clearly in the Oracle docs. ("shutdown transactional" would also be a good alternative for the shutdown script, but "shutdown immediate" is still probably more appropriate.)

I recomend both insuring that all normally running programs which connect to Oracle shut down cleanly before Oracle tries to shut down, and using shutdown immediate for the Oracle shutdown script.

I don't happen to use daemontools so I'm not clear on the details, but Jade's example above looks like a good method for insuring that the normally running AOLservers are killed cleanly. This is good, but not sufficient, as (definitely) if someone starts up an AOLserver manually and forgets to shut it down, or (presumably, I didn't test this) leaves himself logged into sqlplus, Oracle will not shut down, and in fact, will prevent your unix box from shutting down as well.