Question

For testing exception handling in the case of a broken connection it is useful to be able to programmatically request the database to kill a connection.

What’s the best way to do that?

Answer 1

Here are a couple of bits of code to handle that. This works in a RAC multi-node environment. It assumes you have a TNS entry for each of your cluster instances.

1. a shell script to kill a connection:

   #!/bin/sh # oracle-killsession -- kill a specified oracle session  sid=$1; ser=$2; inst=$3 echo -n sys password: stty -echo; read pass; stty echo echo 'alter system kill session '$sid,$ser';'|      sqlplus -SL sys/$pass@$inst as sysdba 

2. a client-side function (this in python) to generate a call to the script. I call this at the beginning of my test program and print the string so I can cut and paste.

   def killstring(curs):     '''return a string that will kill this db connection'''     curs.execute('''SELECT dbms_debug_jdwp.current_session_id,                            dbms_debug_jdwp.current_session_serial,                            sys_context('USERENV', 'INSTANCE_NAME')                     FROM dual''')     (sid,serial,instance)=curs.fetchone()     s='oracle-killsession %s %s %s'%(sid,serial,instance)     return s 

3. and a sample invocation

   $ oracle-killsession 98 45809 orcl2 sys password: System altered. 

4. and from my client… hooray!!!

   cx_Oracle.DatabaseError: ORA-00028: your session has been killed