No. 9: Query V$PARAMETER

This is the ninth of Kevin Loney's "10 Scripts Every DBA Should Have." Watch for a complete article on how to use these scripts in a future issue of Oracle Magazine. There are other valuable scripts as well, but these ten--covering backup/recovery, space management, account management, maintenance, and tuning--provide basic guideposts to start from during your administration activities.

Don't leave $ORACLE_HOME without them!

Don't try to guess what parameters are in effect. You can never tell for sure which INIT.ORA file was used to start an instance, or if the INIT.ORA file has been modified since the database was started. The only sure way to tell the setting of an initialization parameter is to query V$PARAMETER.

column Name format A50
column Value format A28

select Name, Value from V$PARAMETER;