too many session open and you can't log in?

I had a problem last night where you could not log into sql plus. Seen this in cases where you bulk collect and do not use a limit clause and suck up too much memory.

I noticed alot of sessions open at the time. Normally they are opened do a quick query and close. So I should see few open at any one time.

is it possible to open so many sessions that you can't even log into oracle? I tried to kill -9 the sessions, but I believe I remember that this does not really kill the oracle sessions.

how would you proceed if this happened again?

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