Using 'kill -9'

Hi All I have been told by someone at work never to use 'kill -9' to kill Informix programs (.4ge) without doing a 'onmode -z' on the session first. I am trying to find out exactly what happens and why this is necessary. This is because I see people using 'kill -9' all the time and it hasn't ever seemed to cause any problems. All I have been able to find out so far is the following from a web page of the Washington Area Informix User group dating back to 1992. "Any user can bring an Informix-Online instance down by killing an Informix process with kill -9. Never kill a process with Kill -9 always use tbmode -z." When they refer to 'Informix process' in that paragraph, are they refering to user programs (.4ge) or the oninit processes only? Is this something that used to be a problem but was fixed years ago? Thanks Kevin -- Message posted via http://www.dbmonster.com