Linux and Oracle automating startup and shutdown

If you are reading this article you are likely to have encountered a problem wit
h either startup or shutdown of your database on the server. Is there indeed a
problem? There is. If you followed post installation instructions your database
on UNIX-like platforms would start automatically (in most cases) but would not
properly shut down when the server goes down. What do we mean by proper database
shutdown? The database needs to be told to shutdown immediate so that all databas
e files are in sync with control files. What happens when your server is shut do
wn? Well, the OS tries to stop all the known services and processes it can think
of, then it sends term and kill all signals to all the processes that are still aro
und. Among those happened to be your database, so it quietly dies while its file
s are all in disarray. The database is in quite a messy state when it is a time
to start up again. Read your alert logs. Have you noticed that database is doing
instance recovery almost every time it starts? It has to reconcile all the file
s before it can start up. Oracle does a good job in recovery and most of the tim
e database starts just fine. So where is the problem? The real problem starts wh
en the database becomes corrupted during server shutdown. What next? It can not
be recovered at the startup and so you will need to do a backup restore first an
d, probably, lose some of your data.
Is this a proper way to handle your precious (hiss) database? I do not think so.
Lets look at the details.