We are running a small staging setup on an Oracle Database (11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0). We are running jobs using both timed and event-based schedules and our issue is regarding the scheduling.
This setup has been running for about two years now, but we suddenly started experiencing problems with the event-based scheduling. The schedules just didn't start. We don't know if it is the events that didn't fire or just the schedule that didn't work, but none of the jobs that starts on these schedules started.
We tried to resolve the problem by dropping and recreating a schedule, but this resulted in zombie-jobs being created from the jobs already running, that depended on this schedule. These zombie-jobs have no session-ID and even our DBA doesn't know how to kill them. Even our workaround - creating new jobs and schedules, doesn't work - they just don't run. The DB has been restarted a couple of times, which should clear all caches, but this didn't solve anything and our zombie-jobs also survives restarting the DB.
Our DBA has created a ticket at Oracle Support, but they have so far not provided a solution - nor any workaround. They told us that this problem apparently is undocumented.
Questions:
- How do we get the event-based scheduling up and running again?
- How do we kill the zombie-jobs - as far as I know, there's no "decapitate"-function. :(