A while ago I went on a crusade within my organization to review and clean up our init.ora files. Many of them had been around since versions 7.3 and 8.1 of Oracle and were simply added to over time. I still like the text-based init.ora files that I can check into source code control and liberally comment. I'm liking the fact that you can comment on parameters in spfiles too — they even have the comment fields displayable in DB Console and Grid Control.
I'm guessing the init.ora file isn't being reviewed at those places.
End result was a lot more clarity around our settings and why we needed them. We also were able to basically make an init.ora template for ALL databases, since we made such heavy use of defaults.
What's your policy for init.ora files? Do you even have one?
Heh, heh … I know that you mean!
Thanks for this blog – I've referenced it myself today to help draw attention to all the unloved pfile/spfiles out there.
So, when you changed the files, did you break anything ? Did anything improve (beyond the clarity of the files)?
Nothing broke. Didn't see any system behavior changes. There may have been "unnoticeable" improvement :-). Just reducing the number of parameters under consideration helped out in discussions about changes to the file.
I also view the inclusion of template text as bad practice.
To address this, I always placed 'init.ora' configuration files under source control. To me, they were no different and just as important from source code.
Daily overwrite — I like that!
I think it's also important to consider that even if nothing improved, the parameters that were set for some reason, once upon a time should be having a positive effect (i.e. the reason still exists) because, if not, they could well be 'breaking' a potential improvement in later versions.
I'll assume you aren't suggesting that DBAs would just change parameters for the hell of it and break things. That would never happen.