OLTP benchmarking and stress testing suite

Oracle DBA's and developers often find themselves in situations where
they need to measure database performance against a baseline,
typically to ensure that operational improvements deliver the expected
benefits or to ensure that no regression in performance has occurred
as a result of changes.

The changes in question may be due to a server upgrade, an Oracle
upgrade, an operating system upgrade, or something more radical like a
change in operating system or server hardware vendor.

This technote describes three command line tools to facilitate basic
baseline performance information capture with minimal effort:

- Orabmload: loads TPC-C compliant data into a user-chosen number of
Warehouses
- Orabm: stresses the CPU and memory of an Oracle DBMS server
- Orastress!: stresses the DBMS server with a multi-session,
multi-instance load

Orabmload generates the test data for both Orabm and Orastress!. It's
Open Source, and available as a Pro*C program.

They are designed to run out-of-the box and deliver results quickly, to
provide a stake in the ground for the performance of a server running
several different types of Oracle DBMS workload:

- CPU intensive workload - Orabm
- Mixed-workload Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) - Orastress!
- I/O intensive INSERT workload - Orastress!
- I/O intensive direct-path INSERT workload - Orastress!

Orabm transactions are 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), Orabm can
generate a CPU and memory intensive workload with almost zero
physical I/O.

Orastress! runs in one of four possible modes, where the mode is
provided through a command line parameter.

These modes are described in the following section:

--------------------
READ:Runs the identical read-only workload as Orabm to stress CPU and
memory.

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 which
stresses 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.
--------------------

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.

For more information and pricing enquiries please contact us at

Orastress! Homepage is here:
http:/www.linxcel.co.uk/software_orastress!.html

Orastress! User Guide can be found here:
http://www.linxcel.co.uk/orabm/orabm.pdf