Ora-21700 Object Does Not Exist Or Is Marked For Delete When Dropping a User With ST_GEOMETRY Dependencies (Doc ID 1385929.1)

Symptoms

A DROP USER command raises the following error:

ORA-21700: object does not exist or is marked for delete

This is reproducible in an ArcSDE environment, but is not reproducible with simple object types.

ArcSDE has a data cartridge implementation in the schema called SDE, which in turn has an object type ST_GEOMETRY.  This type is distinct from the Oracle object type SDO_GEOMETRY and is used by arcsde to define columns in tables.

How the corruption is introduced:
1. Try to drop user SDE using drop user cascade command: DROP USER SDE CASCADE;
This will generate error if there are objects created using SDE.ST_GEOMETRY because of dependencies

2. Try to drop the tables in other schemas using the SDE.ST_GEOMETRY type
Get also error ORA-21700: object does not exist or is marked for delete

3. Back to SDE and try to drop the SDE.ST_GEOMETRY type gives error
ORA-21700: object does not exist or is marked for delete

Changes

Cause

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