Heterogeneous Services initialization parameters serve two functions:
They give you a means of fine-tuning the gateway to optimize performance and memory utilization for the gateway and the Heterogeneous Services component.
They enable you to inform the gateway (and, thereby, Heterogeneous Services) how the non-Oracle system was configured (for example, in what language the non-Oracle system is running). They give information to Heterogeneous Services about the configurable properties of the non-Oracle system.
You can examine the Heterogeneous Services initialization parameters for a session by querying the view V$HS_PARAMETER. Users can set initialization parameters in gateway initialization files.