Ram, On Unix, you need to kill the unix session first before killing the Oracle session. Kill the spid value returned from this query on the unix prompt: kill -9 999999 Then kill the session within the database with your "alter kill" statement. select v$session.username, spid from v$session, v$process where v$session.username in ('yourusername') and v$session.paddr=v$process.addr order by last_call_et desc Hope this helps. Tom ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ram Raman Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 8:52 PM To: Paul Drake Cc: ORACLE-L Subject: Re: v$session question Thanks Paul. It is HP-UX 11i. Oracle is 10.202. I used the 'Alter system kill session' command from SQL PLus. orakill.exe? Is it for Windows? On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Ram Raman <veeeraman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Listers, When I kill a session and the status shows as "KILLED" in v$session, I assumed that the rollback is taking place. I am not sure what is happening here: