Certification Objective 1.04. Start Up and Shut Down ASM Instances

An ASM instance is started much like a database instance, except that the STARTUP command defaults to STARTUP MOUNT. Because there is no control file, database, or data dictionary to mount, the ASM disk groups are mounted instead of a database. The command STARTUP NOMOUNT starts up the instance but does not mount any ASM disks. In addition, you can specify STARTUP RESTRICT to temporarily prevent database instances from connecting to the ASM instance to mount disk groups.

Performing a SHUTDOWN command on an ASM instance will fail if any connected RDBMS instances exist; you need to shut down the dependent RDBMS instances first. The only exception to this is if you use the SHUTDOWN ABORT command on the ASM instance, which eventually forces all dependent databases to perform a SHUTDOWN ABORT after losing the connection with the ASM instance and generating an ORA-15064 error message.