I'm trying to drop my database and create a new one through the command line.

I log in using psql -U username and then do a \connect template1, followed by a DROP DATABASE databasename;.

I get the error

database databasename is being accessed by other users

I shut down Apache and tried this again but I'm still getting this error. Am I doing something wrong?

6

4 Answers

You can run the dropdb command from the command line:

dropdb 'database name'

Note that you have to be a superuser or the database owner to be able to drop it.

You can also check the pg_stat_activity view to see what type of activity is currently taking place against your database, including all idle processes.

SELECT * FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE datname='database name';

Note that from PostgreSQL v13 on, you can disconnect the users automatically with

DROP DATABASE dbname WITH (FORCE);

or

dropdb -f dbname
5

This worked for me:

select pg_terminate_backend(pid) from pg_stat_activity where datname='YourDatabase';

for postgresql earlier than 9.2 replace pid with procpid

DROP DATABASE "YourDatabase";

3

Try this. Note there's no database specified - it just runs "on the server"

psql -U postgres -c "drop database databasename"

If that doesn't work, I have seen a problem with postgres holding onto orphaned prepared statements.
To clean them up, do this:

SELECT * FROM pg_prepared_xacts;

then for every id you see, run this:

ROLLBACK PREPARED '<id>';
13

When it says users are connected, what does the query "select * from pg_stat_activity;" say? Are the other users besides yourself now connected? If so, you might have to edit your pg_hba.conf file to reject connections from other users, or shut down whatever app is accessing the pg database to be able to drop it. I have this problem on occasion in production. Set pg_hba.conf to have a two lines like this:

local all all ident host all all 127.0.0.1/32 reject

and tell pgsql to reload or restart (i.e. either sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql reload or pg_ctl reload) and now the only way to connect to your machine is via local sockets. I'm assuming you're on linux. If not this may need to be tweaked to something other than local / ident on that first line, to something like host ... yourusername.

Now you should be able to do:

psql postgres drop database mydatabase;