Hi Jared: Thanks for your reply. I waited for 30 minutes before issuing shutdown abort. I did try shutdown immediate afte bringing it up twice later ( waited for 15 mins evetyrime ) - no luck as SMON was busy in housekeeping. It is no a big database ( 100GB with 1.2GB SGA ). -ahmed Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Please define what you consider a hang. How long did wait for shutdown immediate? If there are transactions running, it could take awhile. 10-15 minutes is not all that unusual if there are some long running transactions going on. -- Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist On 4/27/06, Ahmed Ullah <ahmed107@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hello all: We have Oracle 9.2.0.5 database ( single Note RAC ). There were some heavy batch jobs running which cuased the db hang ( only sys connection was working ). We tried to bring down the database after cleaning all sessions. It did not go down with SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE. We had to abort it. I tried to bring down the DB three times with SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE it never went down. _____________________________________________ "If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" --Albert Einstein --------------------------------- Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone calls to 30+ countries for just 2¢/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.