Ok so I admit I haven't been updating the web site recently. Im pretty much overrun with work (and I took a weeks holiday) so updates to swingbench have had to be put on hold. That said I haven't been idle. I've been setting up a RAC cluster under Oracle Virtual Server (NOTE : This is not currently supported).

The environrment is build using 3 Dell Lattitude notebooks and a 1Gb Netgear switch. I've installed one notebook with OpenFiler as the storage server and two additional notebooks with Oracle Virtual Server. (NOTE : this really isn't advised as a production implementation ). I've used the Oracle Enterprise Template to create the Linux Servers running Oracle11g. It was pretty straight sailing with a few notable exceptions

• Many of the shipping templates benefit (and some require) the activation of hardware acceleration. This can be done via the BIOS and will make a big difference to performance in most circumstances.
• UDev and ISCSI. This sadly caused me real problems and Im still not sure why. I was under the impression that the devices presented from the Openfiler (the ISCSI Target) would have consistent ID's. Now I've no reason to make this claim it just seemed like a sensible thing to do. I originally used the ENV{ID} to uniquely identify the devices and create persistent links to the disks. However subsequent reboots showed these to change. We eventually ended up using a rule similar to the folowing

ENV{ID_PATH}=="ip-10.167.176.217:3260-iscsi-iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:iscsistorage.quorumdisk", OWNER="oracle", GROUP="dba", MODE="0640", SYMLINK+="disk/by-name/quorumdisk"

• We also encountered some library issues (rpm), Some of the openfiler devices couldn't be seen however upgrading to the very latest initiator libraries solved the problem (At the time of writing this iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.868-0.7.el5).

Other than that the Oracle install went very smoothly and the cluster appears stable and performs well given the hardware its running on.

Tags: Linux

Just a minor update to datagenerator to fix some scripts and config files. There's also a few fixes to the code.

Im uploading a new build of swingbench that includes support for performing AWR snaps at the start and end of of a benchmark run.



This is a common request and automates a task that a lot of people do. I've also included a new section in the stats that are generated which lists the top 10 (11 to be exact if you include CPU) wait events for a run if you choose to collect database statistics.

I've had a lot of requests about 9i support in swingbench which I appear to have broken. Can you let me know if you still think this is important (I guess its implied by the requests I've had). I need to know whether to focus on this of finish the 2.3 doc.

I'd also appreciate if you could let me know if the wait events I report are in line with the stats you get from ARW... if they're not its down to me not AWR.

Thanks...

Just a quick build to fix cursors not being closed in ccwizard. Still looking into the "-be" and "-bs" issue.

You can get it here

I know things have been a little slow of late in terms of the releases of code but I've just had too much on both at work and at home. The good news is that I've found time to squeeze in a new build of swingbench. This has a number of bug fixes in and the following new functionality.

• Clusteroverview now uses the groupID attribute to determine members of a load generation group. This provides a lot more flexibility for clusteroverview to be used to test technologies such as Oracle Dataguard
• The output from the command line option -v can now be directed to a named file with the -vo option

I've also included a walk through of how to set up clusteroverview in 2.3 with the new GroupID functionality, you can find it here.

Any problems report them through the usual channels...