Question

How do I see what pending changes have been made to an SPFILE before I bounce the database? I know I can see changes in alert log, but it may have been a few months when the change had been made.

For example:

alter system set sga_max_size=1024M scope=spfile;

This doesn’t become active until the next bounce.

Answer 1

You’ll get some noise in the results from this for various reasons, but you can get close by:

select name, value from v$spparameter where isspecified = 'TRUE'
  minus
select name, value from v$parameter;