This post is a mixture of experiences from a recent project and an overview on how to use RAT in a project.

For the second time I have been involved with a proof of concept (PoC) where testing of an alternative hardware platform was the goal. Common for both PoCs were:

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:

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:

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.