Frits Hoogland: DB parameters from spfile

I've mentioned a few of Frits' articles before, and while this one may be a little out in left field for somebody in a Support role that never really gets to deal with pfile/spfile or even ASM, I think it is a good exercise to follow along with!  Frits has a shortcut to use ASM to get the information out of a spfile using the strings command, but as you will see shortly something is not 100% correct so he goes digging into the guts of how Oracle is working with the spfile to come up with a very interesting (and probably right) hypothesis.