Situation: Accidentally deleted millions of rows from a table

An Oracle user may accidentally delete millions of rows from a table, then issue a rollback to reverse the changes, a procedure that could take up to a few hours to complete. If there is a requirement to shut down the database without waiting for the rollback to complete, temporarily restart the database with the rollback disabled, perform some DBA tasks, then restart the database with the rollback enabled.


1. alter system set events '10513 trace name context forever, level 2'  scope=spfile;

2. shutdown abort.

3. startup

Then to restart the rollback.

4. alter system set events '10513 trace name context off' scope=spfile;

5. shutdown abort

6. startup