How to Unlock a User in Oracle

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to unlock a user in Oracle by using the ALTER USER ACCOUNT UNLOCK statement.

To unlock a user in Oracle, you follow these steps:

First, log in to the Oracle Database as a SYS user.
Then, use ALTER USER statement to unlock the user as follows:

ALTER USER username IDENTIFIED BY password ACCOUNT UNLOCK;
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Note that if you unlock an account without resetting the password, then the password remains expired, therefore, the IDENTIFIED BY password clause is necessary. The first time the user logs in to the Oracle Database, he needs to change his password.

Let’s see an example of unlock a user.

Suppose user alice is locked. When alice logs in, she will see the following message:

Enter user-name: alice@pdborcl
Enter password:
ERROR:
ORA-28000: the account is locked
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

To unlock the user alice, you use these steps:

First, log in to the Oracle Database using theot user:

Enter user-name: ot@orclpdb
Enter password: <ot_password>
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Then, use the ALTER USER statement to unlock user alice:

 ALTER USER alice IDENTIFIED BY abcd1234 ACCOUNT UNLOCK;
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Note that abcd1234 is the new password that alice will use to log in the Oracle Database.

Now the user alice should be able to log in the database with the new password.

In this tutorial, you have learned how to unlock a user in the Oracle Database by using the ALTER USER ACCOUNT UNLOCK statement.

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