Question

We have an automated script to restore a Sybase database and then run our automated tests against it. Quite often we have a web server or interactive query tool connected to this database. These connections prevent the Sybase load with “…must have exclusive use of database to run load”.

How do I kick/kill/terminate all connections?

I’d like something similar to Sql Server’s alter database single_user with rollback immediate. This is a local Sybase instance so we have full admin rights.

Answer 1

Without knowing exactly what condition the script checks for, there are two things you need to do to guarantee exclusive use of a database (i) run “master..sp_dboption ‘your-db-name’, ‘single user’, false” to put it in single-user mode, and (ii) kill all existing users first with the “kill” command.

This is not difficult to put in a stored procedure — kill all connections using your database as their current database or having a lock in that database, and then try to set it to single-user mode. Then check if the single-user mode succeeded — you should allow for a repeated try since it is possible that a new user has connected again just when you’re setting it to single-user mode.

This is all not difficult to implement, but you will need some understanding of the ASE system tables. But primarily, I think you need to figure out exactly what it is your load script assumes to be the case and what it checks for.

There may be other solutions as well: if you can just lock the tables affected by your load script for example, that may also be a solution (and a simpler one). But this may or may not be possible, depending on what the load script exactly does and what is expects. So that would be question #1 to answer.

HTH,

Rob V.