I learned something very important when doing testing with Hammerora. The documentation is quite good and has a simple, but important point, the importance of planning and preparation. To quote the documentation for Oracle OLTP testing: Planning and Preparation is one of the most crucial stages of successful testing but is often overlooked. Firstly you should fully document the configuration of your entire load testing environment including details such as hardware, operating system versions and settings and Oracle version and parameters. Once you have fully documented your configuration you should ensure that the configuration is not changed for an entire series of measured tests. This takes discipline but is an essential component of conducting accurate and measured tests. ...

Last week I was running load tests in between other tasks on my agenda. As stated in previous post I wanted to compare performance, as measured by load testing tools, on an old SAN and a new one, EVA and 3PAR respectively. I ran two types of tests, the OLTP test and the SIMPLE test: orion -run oltp -num_disks 50 orion -run simple -num_disks 50 Following are charts from the ORION OLTP test with “num_disks” equal to 50. ...

The current customer is migrating from EVA storage to 3PAR, and inspired by some discussions on Twitter between @yvelikanov, @martinberx, @kevinclosson, @martinDBA, and others I decided to try out some free tools for load testing of Oracle servers. I can hardly tune a SQL statement without getting philosophical about it, so especially this first part is a bunch of thoughts I had when starting out. There are a lot of discussions on the usability of such tools; are the measured performance any close to the reality? The load these tools generate is more or less synthetic. One tool that stands out from the crowd is the Real Application Tool (RAT), but RAT requires an extra license from Oracle. With RAT you can capture real load on a production system and replay it on a test system with new or upgraded hardware or configuration. The reports generated in Enterprise Manager lets you compare the performance of old and new system so clearly that even your CEO can understand it. You cannot get much closer to reality than with RAT, but as said, it costs money and time to set it up. [And for a change I will not whine much more on the fact that SMBs around here do not invest in these licensed packages that makes the life of the DBA easier.] ...

… on a server in the sky I had two things on my agenda, test out HP Cloud and ThinkUp. HP Cloud is still in private beta, but I was lucky to get an invitation after registration. They aim to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and so far I think they have a good chance. It is rather easy to just order and set up a new server in the cloud. A simple and easy interface with few buttons. It is tempting to include a few screen shots here, but I’m not sure if the agreement I just signed allows it. If they expand the interface with more features I hope they keep this simple version for impatient people who just need a server right now. I’ve had great fun with AWS also, but it is crowded with features and things to figure out. For my need of testing a web application the HP Cloud seems just perfect. ...

Perl is included with the Oracle database software (SE and EE), even on Windows. I wrote this to extract the SQL statements from a trace file (generated with sql_trace=true or setting the 10046 event). A simple indentation - one tab for each level - is used to show recursive statements. while (<>) { if(/^PARSING IN CURSOR/) { ($level)=$_=~/\\s+dep=(\\d+)\\s+/ ; $line=<>; while ($line!~/END OF STMT/){ for($i=0;$i<$level;$i++) { print "\\t" ; } print $line; $line=<>; } print "\\n" ; } } You usually have to expand your PATH on Windows to find Perl; you’ll find Perl.exe somewhere below %ORACLE_HOME%. The code will of course work on Linux and other OS where you have Perl. Store the code above in a file called xtract.pl and call it with: ...

The last day started with a master class Key features of redo by Jonathan Lewis. You need quite a good reputation to gather a large crowd to listen on such a subject. Well prepared with good slides, lots of real-world experience together with questions from the crowd made it to a time well spent in the auditorium. He didn’t get through all the slides, but that did not matter since we had two hours filled with entertaining learning. ...

This is my first conference as a board member, and going to a presentation for every slot is not possible. I did go to Doug Burns presentation on SQL Plan Management in 11g though I had actually seen it at OOW 2011, probably because I like Doug’s presentation style. This preso does not go into very much detail on SPM, but takes us on a travel through the subject and leave it to us to actually get some experience on it. It does look interesting, and the only thing that keeps me from getting much experience on it is that the current customer is lagging behind on the upgrades to 11g; the few we have on 11g are small and have not presented any problems with plan instability. ...

23:48, so tired that a Twitter message would be more appropriate. But, just wanted to make it for the record that today turned out to be a very pleasant day. I had the responsibility to host track #5, which started with Martin Büchi on Information Lifecycle Management in OLTP DBs with Partitioning. ILM is a subject that many postpone because it is too complicated. In Martin’s presentation he showed a reference model, illustrated various scenarios with alternative solutions. He then showed how partitioning can be used to archive data that has been aged out. I cannot possible make justice to his presentation, but since I write about it here I’m sure I’ll remember to come back to it, download it and digest it. If Mr Büchi reads this, he has it on record that he did well. Hope he’ll be back again. ...

Tomorrow is the big day. For the last 4 years our annual conference has been on a cruise ship from Oslo to Kiel and back. That is two days with presentations, fun and stuff. A big success we are not going to change at least this year. But, for this conference, we sent out too many invitations to Very Important Presenters and got an impressive positive response; we run out of slots pretty fast. (Let’s say we are not really #1 when it comes to logistics in this country.) So we decided to extend the conference with one day in Oslo before we board the ship on Thursday. Someone called it a pre-conference, which is unfair to the presenters since they are giving real meat tomorrow. Someone called it a whole-day conference, eh, as opposed to the other days? Anyway. tomorrow we’ll have lots of hands-on labs, master classes and what I’m really excited about, RAC Attack. ...

There is a bug in the export utility on version 11.2.0.1 when running against a 11.2.0.2 (and possiby 11.2.0.1) database that has tables without segments. Deferred segment creation was introduced as a smart feature in 11gR2, but this is causing error EXP-00003 when running the old export utility from lower versions. This is reported on MOS for pre-11g clients, but right now I could not find any reports that this is also a problem with the 11.2.0.1 version when this feature was introduced. ...