Oracle: ORA-01089: immediate shutdown in progress - no operations are permitted

Question

I have Oracle XE 10.0.2 installed on my development system.

Recently I have been unable to restart it:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe stop
Shutting down Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance.
Stopping Oracle Net Listener.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe start
Starting Oracle Net Listener.
Starting Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance.

$ sqlplus 

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Feb 4 19:54:53 2014

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Enter user-name: hr
Enter password: 
ERROR:
ORA-01089: immediate shutdown in progress - no operations are permitted

So I tried killing off all oracle processes by hand:

$ sudo killall oracle tnslsnr

This kills the processes (they are no longer listed in ps). I then try starting Oracle again:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe start
Starting Oracle Net Listener.
Starting Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance.

SQL*Plus gives the same error.

/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/admin/XE/bdump/alert_XE.log says:

Starting Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance.
Tue Feb  4 19:59:30 2014
Starting ORACLE instance (normal)

I have not reconfigured Oracle recently, but I have shut it down hard (power off), so it may be in a inconsistent state that I need to force it to recover from.

Solution

A complete guide on how to get Oracle on GNU/Linux unstuck from ORA-01089 is here.

The idea is basically to log in to Oracle as sysdba and issue a shutdown command (oracle user in OS is the standard in this example from the link provided):

root# sudo su - oracle
oracle$ sqlplus
SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Sun Feb 9 15:16:09 2014
Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Enter user-name: / as sysdba
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
SQL> shutdown abort
ORACLE instance shut down.

In a single line:

echo shutdown abort | sudo su - oracle -c "sqlplus / as sysdba"

If this does not work try some of the spells on https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/15888/oracle-shutdown-method and finish up with:

/etc/init.d/oracle-xe stop
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe start

Comments

[Ole Tange]

The processes die (i.e. ps does not see neither oracle nor tnslsnr anymore), so the processes are not hung.

[samiam]

I have updated my answer