does oracle have a way of listing the processes? and let me kill one?

I logged into the system today and oracle was useing all of the processor strength. when I run top on the machine I see this.

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
9433 oracle 19 0 238M 238M 235M R 219M 95.5 23.5 17:38 oracle

It is really chewing up my system. Can I just kill the process with a signal 9?

If you have the privileges, you can query the v_$session table for the SID, SERIAL#, osuser, username, status for all current sessions. Once you have identified the session that is causing the problem, if you have the privileges, you can submit the following command -
ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'SID,SERIAL#';
replacing SID and SERIAL# with the values from the query.

If you don't have the privileges, you will need to work with your DBA to do this.

There is another table that can show you what query the session is trying to execute, but I can't recall it at this time.

I hope this helps...

use the following command to see all the parameters of the various sessions of oracle.

select * from v$session.

Also it comes in handy, when u have to know how many sessions are concurrent.

select count(*) from v$session.


The second query really comes in handy when u have a multi-user system.