Environment variables on Oracle 11g Release 2

• Setting up environment variables

$ vi .bashrc
# add ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_SID
# example
export ORACLE_BASE=/db/app/oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
export ORACLE_SID=oracle_sid

• Test

$ sqlplus /nolog
SQL> connect / as sysdba
SQL>  startup
ORA-01078: failure in processing system parametersLRM-00109: could not open parameter file 'anywhere'

If you are facing the above error while startup of oracle, possible reasons might be the init{ORACLE_SID}.ora file not accessible by oracle user. To solve this problem, you can get your pfile at the location $ORACLE_BASE/admin/$ORACLE_SID/pfile/. A typical file name is init.ora.{NUMBER}. From that location, make a spfile by the following:

$ORACLE_BASE=/db/app/oracle/ and $ORACLE_SID=ora_sid
$sqlplus /nolog
SQL> connect / as sysdba
SQL> create spfile from pfile='/db/app/oracle/admin/ora_sid/pfile/init.ora.{NUMBER}
   File created.
SQL> startup