The following steps outlines how to manually delete a database within Oracle 11g, running in an Linux environment. I am currently running Oracle’s Enterprise Linux release 5 update 2.
- Use SQL*Plus or your favorite SQL command line tool to log in to the target database; log in as sysdba
- Issue the following commands to get the path to various files
select name from v$datafile; select member from v$logfile; select name from v$controlfile; select name from v$tempfile;
- Shut down the database within SQL*Plus, and then exit out of SQL*Plus
shutdown immediate; quit;
- Stop the listener service by issuing the following command in the terminal prompt:
lsnrctl stop
- Recall the file paths found earlier; use them as a check list as you delete each one of those files. Reminder: did you back up your database yet? When ready, go ahead delete your data files, redo log files, control files, and temp files.
- Go to the $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory and delete the tnsnames.ora and listener.ora files
- Go to the $ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory and delete the init[db_name].ora, orapw[db_name], and spfile[db_name].ora files
- Go to the $ORACLE_HOME/admin/[db_name]/pfile directory and delete the init[db_name].ora file
- Go to the $ORACLE_HOME/admin/[db_name]/adump directory and delete all files in that directory
- Edit the file /etc/oratab by removing the line that starts with your database name