java.sql.SQLException: OALL8 is in an inconsistent state message in logs

You might see the following exception in the logs of your WebSphere or Tomcat Application Server,

2009-06-13 17:35:23,294 434385047 ERROR [com.ibm.ws.services.encryption.v1.provider.EncryptionServiceImpl] (web-1:) - org.springframework.transaction.CannotCreateTransactionException: Could not open JDBC Connection for transaction; nested exception is java.sql.SQLException: OALL8 is in an inconsistent state at org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DataSourceTransactionManager.doBegin(DataSourceTransactionManager.java:238)

One of the known reason might be that your database got shutdown in one of the node particularly in a Oracle RAC kind of environment where multiple nodes are present. The error usually recovers once the connections are failed over but it seems like atleast few transactions are failing before it can recover. Also the message is usually preceeded by this message,

2009-06-13 17:35:22,405 434384158 ERROR [org.apache.axis2.engine.AxisEngine] (web-2:) - Could not open JDBC Connection for transaction; nested exception is java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01089: immediate shutdown in progress - no operations are permitted
org.apache.axis2.AxisFault: Could not open JDBC Connection for transaction; nested exception is java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01089: immediate shutdown in progress - no operations are permitted

which indicates that the db is shutting down. If you want to have a gracful shutdown of db without even affecting few transactions then check my other article websphere jdbc connection pool aged timeout setting in websphere might shrink the pool size below the specified Minimum Connection setting in the blog.