Software - Orastress! for Oracle

Oracle OLTP benchmarking and stress testing suite

Oracle DBAs and developers need to measure database performance against a baseline, typically to ensure that operational changes deliver the expected benefits. Changes include application upgrades, server upgrades, Oracle upgrades, operating system upgrades, and more radical operating system or server hardware architecture changes.

Two command line tools provide performance baseline information with minimal effort from a simple command line invocation:

• Orabm: stresses the CPU and memory of an Oracle DBMS server
• Orastress!: stresses the DBMS server with a choice of workloads over multiple instances and sessions including RAC. Orastress! user guide (pdf)

Setup takes a few minutes and requires nothing more than the creation of a database schema and some test data generation through the provided data loader. The tools rapidly deliver performance baseline information for a range of DBMS workload profiles:

• CPU intensive read-only workload - Orabm/Orastress!
• Mixed-workload Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) - Orastress! only
• I/O intensive INSERT workload - Orastress! only
• I/O intensive direct-path INSERT workload - Orastress! only
• User-supplied custom workload - Orastress! only

The read-only workload is based on the Stock-Level and Order-Status read-only transactions in TPC-C. By ensuring that the data fits totally in memory (through an appropriate Oracle configuration), this workload can generate a CPU and memory intensive workload with almost zero physical I/O. Orastress! provides four workload modes where the mode is provided through a command line parameter. These modes are described in the following table:

Command Line Argument	Description
READ	Runs a read-only workload designed to stress CPU and memory. All sessions runs against the same TPC-C Warehouse (W_ID=1) independent of how many Warehouses were created. This workload runs the TPC-C Stock-Level and Order-Status read-only transactions only and is identical to Orabm.
OLTP	Uses all five TPC-C transactions: New-Order, Order-Status, Payment, Stock-Level and Delivery, in order to generate a mixed-transaction (SQL INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) OLTP workload designed to stress CPU, memory, and I/O.
INS	Runs an I/O intensive SQL INSERT workload by copying rows into the ITEM_INS table from the TPC-C ITEM table.
DIO	Runs an I/O intensive direct-path INSERT workload by copying rows into the ITEM_DIO table from the TPC-C ITEM table.
	Revision 3 workloads
READ2	Runs same read-only transactions as READ mode but randomizes sessions across all the available TPCWarehouses in order to generate a read-intensive workload. For example, if you loaded 1000 Warehouses, and ran a 10 session test, each session would be assigned to a Warehouse at random resulting in activity on different subsets of the underlying tables.
CUST1	You provide a SQL script containing SQL of your choice. If this is a SELECT statement, the fetch operation is always performed one row at a time. The script may contain a PL/SQL block, enabling randomized workloads to be generated.
CUST	You provide a SQL script containing SQL of your choice. If this is a SELECT statement, the fetch operation is performed using a configurable number of rows per fetch (batch-size) The default value is 100. The script may contain a PL/SQL block, enabling randomized workloads to be generated. An example is provided in the documentation.

All tests run entirely on the database server without client-server traffic generation, and consecutive transactions run without any delay period: that's because the goal of the tests is to stress the DBMS server.

Orastress! is available as a standalone product with ready built executables for all major operating systems. Minimise your performance testing effort when considering platform moves, changes or migrations.