Stopping sqlldr

Question

I have a process that load data using sqlldr. But sometimes due to other factors in the system it does not stop in a reasonable amount of time. Is there a way to kill sqlldr safely. Using kill -9.

Answer 1

A few issues you can run into if you just kill the sqlldr process:

• If the number of commit rows is small you may have data already-commited which will now have to be removed. This may not matter if you are truncating the tables before use but the cleanup is an operational issue that is dependent upon your system.
• If the number of commit rows and the size of your file is large then you may get issues with the rollback segments being too small or the rollback itself taking a long time to complete (shouldn't an issue if you are using direct path).

You can kill using kill -9 as mentioned, or you can kill the session from within the database:

alter system kill session 'sid,serial#';

If you are using Windows then you can use the orakill utility.