Dropping a connected user from an Oracle 10g database schema

Question

Is there a better way to forcefully disconnect all users from an Oracle 10g database schema than restarting the Oracle database services?

We have several developers using SQL Developer connecting to the same schema on a single Oracle 10g server. The problem is that when we want to drop the schema to rebuild it, inevitably someone is still connected and we cannot drop the database schema or the user while someone is still connected.

By the same token, we do not want to drop all connections to other schemas because other people may still be connected and testing with those schemas.

Anyone know of a quick way to resolve this?

Answer 1

Have you tried ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION? Get the SID and SERIAL# from V$SESSION for each session in the given schema, then do

ALTER SCHEMA KILL SESSION sid,serial#;

Answer 2

To find the sessions, as a DBA use

select sid,serial# from v$session where username = '<your_schema>'

If you want to be sure only to get the sessions that use SQL Developer, you can add and program = 'SQL Developer'. If you only want to kill sessions belonging to a specific developer, you can add a restriction on os_user

Then kill them with

alter system kill session '<sid>,<serial#>'

(e.g. alter system kill session '39,1232')

A query that produces ready-built kill-statements could be

select 'alter system kill session ''' || sid || ',' || serial# || ''';' from v$session where username = '<your_schema>'

This will return one kill statement per session for that user - something like:

alter system kill session '375,64855';

alter system kill session '346,53146';

Answer 3

Just my two cents : the best way (but probably not the quickest in the short term) would probably be for each developer to work on his own database instance (see rule #1 for database work).

Installing Oracle on a developer station has become a no brainer since Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

Answer 4

Make sure that you alter the system and enable restricted session before you kill them or they will quickly log back into the database before you get your work completed.