Dropping connected users in Oracle database

Question

I want to drop some users in Oracle DB using sqlplus but I am getting error:

SQL> DROP USER test CASCADE;
DROP USER test CASCADE
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01         


        

Answer 1

Basically I believe that killing all sessions should be the solution, but...

I found similar discussion - https://community.oracle.com/thread/1054062 to my problem and that was I had no sessions for that users, but I still received the error. I tried also second the best answer:

sql>Shutdown immediate;

sql>startup restrict;

sql>drop user TEST cascade;

What worked for me at the end was to login as the user, drop all tables manually - select for creating drop statements is

select 'drop table ' || TABLE_NAME || ';'  from user_tables;

(Needs to be re-run several times because of references)

I have no idea how is that related, I dropped also functions and sequences (because that was all I had in schema)

When I did that and I logged off, I had several sessions in v$session table and when I killed those I was able to drop user.

My DB was still started in restricted mode (not sure if important or not).

Might help someone else.

BTW: my Oracle version is Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production