Now, I know that this answer will not be specific. But there are v$ and dba_ views that give you every piece of information about your Oracle database. The specific one that holds the information from the init.ora is not right off the top of my head.
My guess is that it is either v$parameter or dba_parameter. But that is a complete guess. And since my work won't give me DBA priviledges, I can't go check.
And on that note, you must log in as a DBA or sysDBA to access this information. Which in a
Java class, seems to scare me greatly.
Can't you set it in a try-catch statement and if it is already set, then an exception will be thrown that you catch, and continue on, since it is already running.
Mark
[ October 06, 2003: Message edited by: Mark Spritzler ]