How to drop/delete instance

Question

Hi all,
I need to delete or drop an instance from the database. How do i do it? What command to use to drop the entire instance with the data in it. I dont need the instance as we'r creating a new one.pls help on how to delete instance.
Thanks
M.Kaur

Answer 1

An instance is merely a set of memory structures. If you stop the instance, those memory structures disappear. So you can't say, 'I don't want to stop the instance but remove it' unless you and I are talking a completely different language where words have new meanings. To "remove" an instance, you stop it. But the correct terminology is "stopping an instance".
If i would to delete my datafiles,control files and redo logs files, how should I do that
Well, how do you delete any file? Depends on my OS, of course, but del *.txt usually does the trick of deleting all text files on Windows, and there's rm *.txt for doing the same thing on Linux or Unix. It's a safe bet that to delete all traces of a physical database, you're going to need to do something like del *.ctl or rm *.dbf.
So no, you can't delete all traces of a database without having access to the file system. And you won't get that from SQL*Plus.
And no, there are no scripts I can provide for this sort of thing. Apart from anything else, I haven't a clue what operating system you're running, so my forward slashes might need to be your backslashes or vice versa. But even if I knew, I wouldn't provide you with a script: deleting a database is something you do with care and understanding, not something you can borrow someone else's generic scripts for!