It would sit, unless you have a profile (or semething else -FW timeout, etc) that would kill it. Oracle takes care of deadlocks by killing one of the sessions. If the user holds a lock (and there is no deadlock) then it will just sit there until the session is killed (this is why they gave us "shutdown immediate") From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Howard Latham Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 6:05 AM To: ORACLE-L Subject: Puzzle - Abandoned Terminal. We were just chatting about the problem of users abandoning their terminals and the question arose - How long could a user leave an uncommitted transaction before it got rolled back?. Which mechanism do we thionk would eventually deal with it? I know the DBA gets called if a deadlock occurs but theoretically how long could it sit there. -- Howard A. Latham