Graceful kill, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the lightning bolt

[hbar]

(sorry for the accidental cross post)

So when you have a procedure that is running for a good while, and you click the lightning bolt in plsd, the procedure that was running exits gracefully through its exception handler, just as you might hope.

But sometimes you don't have a window where you can click a lightning bolt; sometimes it's a dbms_job that is running. Of course alter system kill session doesn't seem to use the exception handler, and kill -9 from the shell certainly doesn't exit gracefully either.

So what exactly does the lightning bolt do, and how can I mimic that funcitonality toward a dbms_job?

 

[Marco Kalter]

The lightning bolt sends an OCIBreak to the server. It can only be done from within the context of the session, so it work with a dbms_job.