Filesystem space not freed when drop tablespace

Hi,

we have a unix server running HP-UX hp-adv-2 B.11.11 U 9000/800. 4 processors, Oracle 10.1.0.4.0.

When I do a "drop tablespace MY_TBL_10M including contents and datafiles", then it sometimes happens that the space in the file system does not get freed. Sometimes it lasts a few minutes, sometimes one can wait forever.

Ok, this basically means that Oracle still has a valid open file pointer to the datafile(s) and thus Unix cannot free the space.

Well, but why doesn't Oracle release it? We waited about 18 hours (expecting that in some idle system phase over night Oracle cleans up and closes file pointers), but nothing happened. We then finally restarted the database to get the space in the file system freed.

Is there anything which we can do to monitor which session or Oracle process still holds a reference to a dropped datafile in a dropped tablespace?

Restarting the database is a very crude solution and not recommended to us...

Best regards,
  Alex Received on Thu Mar 23 2006 - 07:12:46 CST