Nuances when dropping an Oracle user, by Zahar Hilkevich

When you need to drop a user who is not currently connected to the database, the task is trivial (please do not try it if you don’t really need to drop your user):

DROP USER SCOTT CASCADE;

With actively used database user schemas,  the above command may fail due to active Oracle sessions opened by that user (ORA-01940: cannot drop a user that is currently connected). So you may want to drop all those sessions first before dropping the user:

DECLARE
    CURSOR c IS
    SELECT sid, serial#
    FROM v$session 
    WHERE username='SCOTT';

    v_sql  VARCHAR2(200):='ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''{sid},{serial#}'' IMMEDIATE';
    v_kill VARCHAR2(200);
BEGIN
    FOR v IN c LOOP
        v_kill:=REPLACE(v_sql,'{sid}',v.SID);
        v_kill:=REPLACE(v_kill,'{serial#}',v.serial#);
        EXECUTE IMMEDIATE v_kill;
    END LOOP;
END;
/

Seems like we are ready now to drop the user? Not so quick! While we were dropping existing sessions, the user might have opened more new sessions, so dropping a user may still fail with the same error:

ORA-01940: cannot drop a user that is currently connected

To work around this issue, we need to apply a simple trick: revoke a privilege to create a session before killing existing sessions! Here is a complete script (to be executed as SYS or SYSTEM):

REVOKE CONNECT FROM scott -- so new sessions will be blocked
/
--If CREATE SESSION privilege was granted to scott, we may want to revoke it as well
--Kill existing sessions:
DECLARE
    CURSOR c IS
    SELECT sid, serial#
    FROM v$session 
    where username='SCOTT';

    v_sql  VARCHAR2(200):='ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''{sid},{serial#}'' IMMEDIATE';
    v_kill VARCHAR2(200);
BEGIN
    FOR v IN c LOOP
        v_kill:=REPLACE(v_sql,'{sid}',v.SID);
        v_kill:=REPLACE(v_kill,'{serial#}',v.serial#);
        EXECUTE IMMEDIATE v_kill;
    END LOOP;
END;
/
--Drop the user
DROP USER SCOTT CASCADE
/

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