How to kill an Oracle process on Windows Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting October 20, 2007

 

Question:  I'm used to the "kill -9" syntax in UNIX for killing an Oracle process, but I don't know how to kill an Oracle process on Windows.

 

Answer:  As a quick review, you can kill an Oracle session from within Oracle, but that does not always terminate the OS process.  First, you get the SID and serial number of the session that you want to kill:

 

select
   spid,
   osuser,
   s.program
from
   v$process p,
   v$session s
where
   p.addr=s.paddr;
 

Next, you kill the session from insude SQL*Plus:

 

alter system mill session 'mysid, myserial_no';

 

You can also invoke the dbms_sql.kill_session procedure to kill a Windows session from inside Oracle.

 

Killing a Windows Task
 

In Windows we have several utilities, the Oracle-centric "orakill" utility and the Windows "taskill" program.  The Windows command to kill this session would be as follows.

C:\oracle9i\bin>orakill ORCL92 768

In this example, the windows thread corresponding to the Oracle session can be killed in the operating system without ever logging into the database.

 

You can also use the Windows taskkill utility to remove an Oracle Windows process:

 

c:>tasklist

oracle.exe 9311 Console 0 5,072 K
 

c:>taskkill /pid 9311

SUCCESS: The process with PID 9311 has been terminated.
 

 

See my related notes on killing Oracle processes here: