Problem working with Alter session

I am working with a table containing 350000+ records. I performed a normal update statement(updating only one column for all the records). For which it was taking a very long time. I just killed the sqlplus session running and logged to Oracle Server once again. Incidently the Oracle server process for the previous session was still running, which I confirmed thro' the V$SESSION view and promptly killed it. My problem is, V$SESSION still shows the process and if I try to kill it once again it returns with an error:

ORA-00030: user session ID does not exist

Because of the killed/dead session my table is locked and I could do nothing with it other then select.
(Also no Unix process started by Oracle is running. Confirmed with ps -fu )

Can anybody please suggest a solution for this. I belive shutting down the database and restarting it once again could solve the problem, but could'nt afford to do so. Also I tried replicating the table with another name which I could not do so because of the huge data some 350000+ ( exp file approx 25.6 MB) tablespace ran out of space.

Thanks in Advance
Vinayak.

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum Received on Mon Aug 03 1998 - 05:48:21 CDT