is used for RAC where you can have a shared spfile and have the instance name instead of the *. However in your case someone at one point did create pfile from spfile; and started using that to start the instance On 9/27/05, Adams, Matthew (GE Consumer & Industrial) <MATT.ADAMS@xxxxxx> wrote: > > > Anybody ever seen a init.ora file in an init.ora file that looks like > > *.db_block_size=8192 > *.db_cache_size=256M > > etc? >