Re: "tbmode -z" doesn't kill - or even wound!

My experience with tbmode is as follows: kill -9 will kill the process without telling the database engine that it is dying. This is BAD, as you frequently get corrupted pages and need to call and have someone from Informix or Plexus dial in and change the DB page by page. kill -15 will kill the process gently by sending an interrupt to the database engine. This causes the database engine to rollback to current transaction and die. The database can then clean up. Depending on the transaction running, this can take even hours (some idiot runs a monster join update that takes up the entire log file...). You can watch the rollback in the monitors. tbmode -z is supposed to be similar to kill -15. In the past using an old version of Plexus (with a buggy optical jukebox interface) I was forced to kill -9. Once the process was dead I ALSO had to do the tbmode -z to clean out the process in the database engine. In general, be very careful. Tbmode is the only method I recommend for killing a db process, but sometimes (in VERY SPECIFIC cases, e.g. optical jukebox jams) you need to power. Using kill -9 should only be done when you have done the analysis to determine that the DB engine is not rolling back a transaction, and that, for example, some lowsy piece of hardware is locking the process. Cheers, David