Killing Oracle Sessions

This is something I can never remember off the top of my head. So here we go:
Credit: http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/misc/KillingOracleSessions.php

Identify the Session to be Killed

Killing sessions can be very destructive if you kill the wrong session, so be very careful when identifying the session to be killed. If you kill a session belonging to a background process you will cause an instance crash.

Identify the offending session using the V$SESSION or GV$SESSION view as follows.

SET LINESIZE 100
COLUMN spid FORMAT A10
COLUMN username FORMAT A10
COLUMN program FORMAT A45

SELECT s.inst_id,
       s.sid,
       s.serial#,
       p.spid,
       s.username,
       s.program
FROM   gv$session s
       JOIN gv$process p ON p.addr = s.paddr AND p.inst_id = s.inst_id
WHERE  s.type != 'BACKGROUND';

   INST_ID        SID    SERIAL# SPID       USERNAME   PROGRAM
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------------------------------------------
         1         30         15 3859       TEST       sqlplus@oel5-11gr2.localdomain (TNS V1-V3)
         1         23        287 3834       SYS        sqlplus@oel5-11gr2.localdomain (TNS V1-V3)
         1         40        387 4663                  oracle@oel5-11gr2.localdomain (J000)
         1         38        125 4665                  oracle@oel5-11gr2.localdomain (J001)

SQL>

The SID and SERIAL# values of the relevant session can then be substituted into the commands in the following sections.

ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION

The basic syntax for killing a session is shown below.

SQL> ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#';

In a RAC environment, you optionally specify the INST_ID, shown when querying the GV$SESSION view. This allows you to kill a session on different RAC node.

SQL> ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#@inst_id';

The KILL SESSION command doesn't actually kill the session. It merely asks the session to kill itself. In some situations, like waiting for a reply from a remote database or rolling back transactions, the session will not kill itself immediately and will wait for the current operation to complete. In these cases the session will have a status of "marked for kill". It will then be killed as soon as possible.

In addition to the syntax described above, you can add the IMMEDIATE clause.

SQL> ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#' IMMEDIATE;

This does not affect the work performed by the command, but it returns control back to the current session immediately, rather than waiting for confirmation of the kill.

If the marked session persists for some time you may consider killing the process at the operating system level. Before doing this it's worth checking to see if it is performing a rollback. You can do this by running this script (session_undo.sql). If the USED_UREC value is decreasing for the session in question you should leave it to complete the rollback rather than killing the session at the operating system level.