I don't know if this is what happened to the reluctant hero of this story, but if the database really had hung, and wasn't responding to "sensible" methods of s

I don't know if this is what happened to the reluctant hero of this story, but if the database really had hung, and wasn't responding to "sensible" methods of shutting down, what are you supposed to do besides kill -9? (By "sensible" I mean something the DB could trap in order to finish saving a consistent state to disk - shutdown command, -INT, -QUIT, etc.) (I'm not excusing trying -9 as a first resort, but if a process is deadlocked (or pegging the CPU in a tight loop) and won't respond to -QUIT, there's not much else you can do.)