Delete / drop database

Windows

Check where the ORACLE_HOME for this instance is

Start:Run... services.msc

Double click on OracleService<SID>, the first part of "Path to executable" is the home or regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE See list of homes

Find location of files to delete

Connect as sys and

select name from v$datafile;
select member from v$logfile;
select member from v$controlfile;
show parameter dump
show parameter archive_dest
select name from v$database; -- to be sure!

Stop the services related to the instance

set ORACLE_HOME=<oracle home>
oradim -delete -sid <SID>

*Clean up database files:
delete %ORACLE_HOME%\database\PWD<SID>.ora and any pfile, spfile and .dat files
Delete the files and directories shown by above queries

Check in Registry to make sure entries have gone from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_<home>

Unix

• Clean up RMAN repository

rman target sys/sys@DBTOGO catalog rman/rman@rmancat
RMAN> unregister database;

• Drop the database (using the silent option of dbca)

. oraenv
DBTOGO
dbca -silent -deleteDatabase -sourceDB DBTOGO
Connecting to database
4% complete
9% complete
14% complete
19% complete
23% complete
28% complete
47% complete
Updating network configuration files
48% complete
52% complete
Deleting instance and datafiles
76% complete
100% complete

or

startup force mount restrict
drop database;

• Delete database references manually from other places
  • ${ORACLE_HOME}/network/admin/tnsnames.ora (possibly on many hosts)
  • ${ORACLE_HOME}/network/admin/listener.ora (probably only on this host)
  • stop / restart the listener if this db was attached to a general listener
  • remove entry from /etc/oratab
• Is it a clustered database?

If so, remove it from the Veritas (Solaris) or HACMP (AIX) configuration.

• Remove from any monitoring software (Grid, 3rd party)
• Clean any cleanup script where it may be hard-coded (Eek!)
• Delete archivelog directory
• Remove the database definition from backup software