Hi! At least with releases earlier than 10g, running alter system kill session is not enough, the (unix) process can still remain, so you need to add a little piece of java stored procedure to performa a kill -9 pid. In 10g it works better and we barely see the need to kill -9. We have a web page (using mod_plsql) where users can login and see their own db sessions (plus other info), then they can kill them at will . We are implementing now the concept of power users that can kill other db sessions. regards. Nilo Segura Oracle Support - IT/DES CERN - Geneva Switzerland -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l