From somewhere off the Internet:

The script creates a file in /var/lock/subsys to indicate that the subsystem or process is running, while the default script does not. As a background, the script /etc/rc.d/rc, when killing processes will execute all scripts for that runlevel that begin with a K, and it also checks if the subsystem is running by checking for the presence of a file, whose name must be similar, in /var/lock/subsys. Therefore, if you use the default script, it will not shutdown the database because of this missing file in /var/lock/subsys.