How does Oracle decide what init<sid>.ora to use?

I have an NT server running many instances of oracle (8.0.5). The oracle 'home' is d:\orant\, and in d:\orant\database, there are a lot of init<sid>.ora files.

Today, I was asked to increase a paramater in the init file. I went into the above directory, found the init<sid>.ora file, made the change, bounced the instance, and ... no change.

I then used the (excellent!) utility 'Filemon' to see what file was being read on startup, and it turned out to be F:\orant\database\init<sid>.ora.

I edited this file, bounced the instance (stop/start services in NT), and my change was reflected.

SO - I looked in the registry at the service definition OracleStart<sid>, but no location there.

Later - may have answered my own question (thus posting for confirmation and/or benefit of others with same question!)

I finally saw a file 'strt<sid>.cmd' in the d:\orant\database folder. This batch file had the location F:\orant\database in it. So does Oracle create a simple dos batch program that is used by the service startup? Received on Wed Feb 21 2001 - 19:15:24 CST