Database Initialization File in Oracle

As you learned in earlier in this course, the initialization file is a text file containing a number of parameter settings that are used when you start an instance. These parameters control such things as the amount of memory used by the instance, the database block size, the maximum number of processes, and a large number of other settings that control the way in which the instance operates.

When you create a database, one of the first things you need to do is to create the initialization file for that database. That is what we are going to do in the remainder of this module. During this course, those of you who are running Oracle will be building a project database.Since our project database will be about coins, let's name the database COIN. The OFA guidelines specify init.oraSample, where Sample is the database name, as the naming convention to use for initialization files. We will follow that guideline, and name our initialization file initCOIN.ora.
If you are running Oracle, go ahead and create a blank initCOIN.ora file. You can use Notepad to do this. When you open Notepad you will get a blank file. Use the

File->Save As

menu option to save this blank file as initCOIN.ora. Place it in whichever of the following locations is appropriate, depending on the operating system and the version of the Oracle database software that you are using:

For UNIX:
$ORACLE_BASE/admin/COIN/pfile
For Windows NT:
c:\oracle\admin\COIN\pfile

You will need to create the directory for the COIN database. It won't already exist. You will also need to create the pfile directory, underneath the COIN directory. Do this using the standard commands for whatever operating system that you are using. For example, on UNIX, you might issue these commands:

mkdir $ORACLE_BASE/admin/COIN
mkdir $ORACLE_BASE/admin/COIN/pfile

mkdir c:\oracle\admin\COIN
mkdir c:\oracle\admin\COIN\pfile

If you are running UNIX, you may find that Oracle has separated initialization parameters into two groups.