ORA-32004 obsolete and/or deprecated parameter(s) specified

Cause

One or more obsolete and/or parameters were specified in the SPFILE or the PFILE on the server side.

Action

See alert log for a list of parameters that are obsolete. or deprecated. Remove them from the SPFILE or the server side PFILE.

So somebody, somewhere has put obsolete and/or deprecated parameter(s) in my initDB.ora file. To find out which you could from SQL*PLUS, issue the following statement, to find the sinner.

SQL> select name, isspecified from v$obsolete_parameter where isspecified='TRUE';

Or if you are the one, who has made the changes to initDB.ora, you might know which one. In my case somebody had been messing around with the parameter log_archive_start;

In order to remove this, you should create a pfile from spfile and back to spfile? Thats the way to do it.

SQL> startup
ORA-32004: obsolete and/or deprecated parameter(s) specified
ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area 167772160 bytes
Fixed Size 1247900 bytes
Variable Size 88081764 bytes
Database Buffers 75497472 bytes
Redo Buffers 2945024 bytes
Database mounted.
Database opened.
SQL>
SQL> alter system reset log_archive_start scope=spfile sid='*' ;

System altered.

SQL> shutdown immediate
Database closed.
Database dismounted.
ORACLE instance shut down.
SQL>
SQL> startup
ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area 167772160 bytes
Fixed Size 1247900 bytes
Variable Size 88081764 bytes
Database Buffers 75497472 bytes
Redo Buffers 2945024 bytes
Database mounted.
Database opened.
SQL> disconnect
Disconnected from Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
SQL>