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 [G]V$SESSION and [G]V$PROCESS views 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.

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;