Friday, November 18, 2011

New Dimension to resolve ORA-01078 LRM-00109

Not a database expert though, I came across this issue which kept me busy for some time. When trying to issue 'startup' command from sql prompt in a terminal/command prompt, I hit this issue;

ORA-01078: failure in processing system parameters
LRM-00109: could not open parameter file '/home/oracle/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/dbs/init_orcl.ora'

A quick reference to various blogs, forums and Oracle Docs on the web advised to check few things with possible solutions like,

1.) Check whether the parameter file is present in the location mentioned above. (Solution was to generate the pfile and place it under the dbs folder)

2.) If the pfile is available, then check the permissions on the pfile specified

3.) set the ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID environment variables

Although there is no denial of the aforesaid issues/solutions, I observed that the ORACLE_SID is case sensitive (which is not the case when you connect from sql developer/ other tools). When I issued the ORACLE_SID value as orcl (lower case), I got the error under consideration. However, when I changed the environment variable to hold the value as ORCL (upper case) then the issue was resolved.

You can issue lsnrctl -status command to find out the SID of your database instance and set it in ORACLE_SID variable (case sensitive !!!)

Sounds silly. Yeah. One of the small things which keep us wondering and perplexed.

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