This is the strength of Oracle dedicated process architecture. Some user processes might die but the others will work and may be your last opportunity to remedy the situation (export critical data for example.) Brgds, Laimis N --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail From: "MacGregor, Ian A." <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Date: 2014.08.05 01:42 Subject: FastStart Failover Problem. Sent by: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx We’ve been running FastStart Failover for quite a while, and it has served us well. However we had an interesting problem a couple of weeks ago. The primary server panicked but got stuck on the way down. It entered a state where it was not accepting any new connections either via sql*net or ssh. However, existing connections were not closed. Thus dataguard saw the primary database as being up. Even though no one could connect to it. Ian MacGregor SLAC National Laboratory-- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l