'drop tablespace' produces a file/table lock??

Just had an interesting problem and wondered if anyone knew the why of it - I just dropped a tablespace. Went to delete the file at the OS level (I'm in 8.1.7.4.1 on Win2K) and Windoze wouldn't let me - said there was a sharing violation. I've only done this a gazillion times in *nix and other OS'. Closing the SQL*Plus session that I had used to drop the tablespace released whatever lock there was; presumably ORACLE.EXE had a lock on the datafile until I exited SQL*Plus.

When I was a VAXcluster manager several decades and a marriage ago, one could create one's own message classes. Many had a 'WTF' class (one leaves it to the reader to parse out the acronym); and any error not otherwise trapped returned something like "WTF - what are you trying to do?" to the unfortunate user. This just seems like one of those situations.

If anyone knows definitively what was going on I'd appreciate hearing about it.

TIA - Best regards,
jh Received on Thu Jul 24 2003 - 15:36:01 CDT