ORACLE: displaying initialization parameters

Pulled from here and here.

Thinking I was clever I created a little parms.sql which will pull out all matching initialization parameters from the v$parameter table. Of course I find out that there's a built in way of doing this:

C:\> sqlplus someuser/passwd@tnsname
[snip]
SQL> show parameter spfile

NAME         TYPE        VALUE
------------ ----------- ------------------------------
spfile       string      %ORACLE_HOME%\DATABASE\SPFILE%
                         ORACLE_SID%.ORA

And while we're at it, here's how you get the full set of all parameters in a nice human readable format:

SQL> create pfile='filename' from spfile;

Note₁: this creates the file on the server beside the original spfile (see VALUE above.)
Note₂: you need to run this as sys as sysdba

[Listening to: Barry White - My First, My Last, My Everything]