I was wondering how to set up a cold backup script with a multi user install of applications. If it's not harmful I could just shutdown and restart the database as the oracle user, but I wasn't sure if it could just be bounced with the rest of apps running.

If not, and not being able to run a script as root to su for the processes, would you have to just time it with cron? Eg, shutdown apps, then shutdown db, backup db, restart db, restart apps. I dont' think that would be a good idea of course

If it's ok to bounce the DB I can just do it with the oracle user, if not then I'm not sure of a good way to do it.