The 248 days oracle 10g bug

It was a a day like another at the office. I was working on my software trying to improve it. I was pretty confident that this day will be fine and I could do the work I have to do without being disturb by some production bug.

I was wrong. Happily this doesn't happen to me in production.

Everyday some of my tables are emptied and loaded by scripts using sqlplus client. This day every scripts failed to do their jobs. More than that, I had some processes hanging there and consumming CPU.

After a lot of head scratching, I finally tried to run the sqlplus command on my linux server. Nothing happen and I had to hit Ctrl+C to get the prompt back. And guess what... I had another process doing nothing.

I asked to the database guys of my company and they told me that I probably hit an oracle bug known as bug 4612267.

Oracle client connection will hang and leads to high CPU Utilization when machine uptime > 248 days

Possible solutions :
- reboot
- install patch 4944727