How to delete a database

In this post, I take an interesting topic and nothing complicated of how to erase a single Oracle database. This affects only the database, nohing happens to the RDBMS binary files.

The first thing to do is to get down the database’s instance to avoid someone connected to it, to do this, you have issue the option immediate of the shutdown command:

SQL> shutdown immediate 
Database closed. 
Database dismounted. 
ORACLE instance shut down.

Once the database’s instance is down, you must mount the database with the option exclusive restrict to avoid new user connections:

SQL> startup mount exclusive restrict 
ORACLE instance started. 

Total System Global Area  665415680 bytes 
Fixed Size                  1385564 bytes 
Variable Size             448793508 bytes 
Database Buffers          209715200 bytes 
Redo Buffers                5521408 bytes 
Database mounted.

Then, after the database is mounted, the only thing else that you must do is to issue the drop database as you can see in the next example:

SQL> drop database; 
ERROR: 
ORA-01034: ORACLE not available 
Process identifier: 2676 
Session identifier: 1 Serial number: 5 

Database dropped. 

Disconnected from Oracle Database 11g Release 11.2.0.2.0 - Production

So after the database will complete erased. Be careful with this command because you will have just a previous backup to  recover from it.

Please, leave a comment if this post was useful for you or if you have any doubt about the contents, I will OrAnswer you as soon as possible.