sounds silly but how do you do this in sybase? I use the gui tool sybase central and it doesnt have any option to take a databse offline.

thanks

You can't do that within sybase central - it's not equipped with that capability. You can only do so via isql, but there is no direct way!
It also depends on what you want:

a) If you want to do that without rebooting your server, it's only possible with the ver 12.5.1(currently beta) - mount/unmount feature.

b) 1 method I can think of is to explicitly mark the db as suspect with:
sp_configure "allow update",1
udpate sysdatabase set status = 384 where name = "target_dbname"
shutdown with nowait

Server will be rebooted and the db will be taken off the server.
NB. You must remember to set the 'status' back to the original value to revert back.

c) Suspend (kind of 'offline' because it restrict access) the db with the quiesce db feature:
quiesce database tag_name hold target_dbname
...
quiesce database tag_name release

This method does not reboot server and the db remains in the server.

Tezza.

Why do you want to put it offline ? a single user mode + dbo use only is not sufficiant ?