Im releasing a new build of Datagenerator simply because there hasn’t been one for a while. Thats not to say it hasn’t undergone significant changes. Most of them are as a result of enhancements to support schema creation for swingbench. In particular is the introduction of Pre and Post generation scripts. These allow me to run a complete schema creation from within datagenerator. These scripts appear as top level items from within the tree (see below).



In the side panel you can now include scripts and parameters for the scripts.



I’ve also included the script files used for generating the SH and SOE schemas used by swingbench. This should make it easier to understand what is going on and potentially create your own versions of the schemas.

In this release I’ve also improved the threading model and included one or two other performance enhancements....

In the next release I’m going to try and add support for for well know data items such as zip/post codes, NI numbers, Social Security etc.... as well as allowing users to plug their own data generators in.

You can download it from the usual place and as before leave comments below or via the comments page.

Tags: Oracle, Random, schema

Just wishing everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!!

See you next year...

Dom

I’ve released another little utility called “Database Time Monitor”. I think the name speaks for itself. You can find more details here and download it here.

Tags: Wait Events, Oracle

I’ve just posed a minor update to CPUMonitor to try and fix a few bugs and improve the debugging. You can download it from the usual place here

After a bit of a delay Im releasing a new build of swingbench. It has a large number of fixes reflected in the difference in build numbers. Some of the changes include

• A new report at the end of wizard driven install that details the speed of the install but also whether the objects that have been created are valid
• A fix to clusteroverview that prevented it starting
• A fix to the cpumonitor that prevented it from running in some instances
• Some icon changes
• Warning and error alerts are now fired inside of the wizard to highlight potential issues
• Fix that prevented install logs being saved
• Average response time can now be displayed in command line mode
• Removed the required to run the wizards in headless mode
• Fixed numerous UCP issues
• Many other fixes

The new report looks like this

Im hoping it should make it easier to understand if a install worked correctly.

You can download the new build here. As usual let me know if it hangs together.

Tags: swingbench new release

I’ve uploaded a new build of TraceAnalyzer that fixes a few issues. You can download it from here

Tags: Oracle trace trc analyzer tkprof

I’ve just uploaded a minor update to swingbench to solve a few minor bugs.

You can download it here

I’ve just released 0.2 of cpumonitor. Its got a few nice features in it.

• Support for Solaris
• A Mini view (use the -md option on the command line)
• New charting engine (a bit punchier)
• Encrypted passwords in config file
• Fixes for rendering on Linux and Unix
• Reports errors for failed connections

It will require Java 6 to run and you will need to make sure that you enable “Password Authentication” in your sshd_config file (enabled by default on Linux) i.e in sshd_config add or uncomment the following line on the target server
# To disable tunneled clear text passwords, change to no here!PasswordAuthentication yes

You can download it from here as usual.

The following are a few screen shots of the mini mode and the max mode (default)

Tags: cpumonitor

Another minor update incoming to 2.4.0.639.... minor fixes. You can download it here

I’ve updated swingbench to build 628 which includes the following fixes

• Updates to the “order entry” benchmark
• Wizards now use user selected thread count
• Swingbench now correctly loads new config files from the menu
• Feedback on wizard builds (metrics such as MB/sec generated etc)

They’ll be a new update again shortly with

• Checks at start and end of wizard builds
• New benchmark run summaries

As usual you can download it here. Let me now what you think here

Tags: update,swingbench

A couple of things to watch for if you are building a large SOE schema. The first is temp space. I guess its obvious but if you are building a 1TB schema with 100GB+ tables the indexes are going to be pretty big as well. If you are creating big indexes you need plenty of TEMP. The number of schema’s I’ve looked at that haven’t had their indexes build is amazing. I guess this is partly my fault as well. I’ll include a start and end validation process in the next build. Should have done this before but I guess people weren’t building such big schema’s

As a guide line for a schema of size “x” I’d have at least “x/6” worth of temp space i.e. 1TB schema needs about 180GB of temp. You can resize it after the build to what ever you decide is appropriate.

As to what it should look like on completion... well something like this
SOE@//localhost/orcl > @tables;Tables======Table Rows Blocks Size Compression  Indexes Partitions Analyzed-------------------- ---------- ----- ------ ----------- ------- ---------- ----------WAREHOUSES       1,000     60    1024k Disabled    2       0 < WeekORDERS     225,000  1,636      13M Disabled    5       0 < WeekINVENTORIES     924,859 10,996      87M Disabled    3       0 < WeekORDER_ITEMS     587,151  2,392      19M Disabled    3       0 < WeekPRODUCT_DESCRIPTIONS 1,000     60    1024k Disabled    2       0 < WeekLOGON      50,000    250       2M Disabled    0       0 < WeekPRODUCT_INFORMATION   1,000     60    1024k Disabled    3       0 < WeekCUSTOMERS     200,000  2,014      16M Disabled    5       0 < Week


Another really important thing is to include the SOE_MIN_CUSTOMER_ID and SOE_MAX_CUSTOMER_ID in the environment variables within the config file. This will reduce the startup time of the benchmark. Follow the instructions below or edit the config file

Select the Environment Variables tab and press the button (you’ll need to do this for each environment variable).



Add two Enviroment variables

• SOE_MIN_CUSTOMER_ID : The value equals the smallest customer id in the data set, usually 1
• SOE_MAX_CUSTOMER_ID : The largerst customer id found in the data set

You can determine what thes values are by running a piece of SQL similar to this when logged into the SOE schema

SELECT /*+ PARALLEL(CUSTOMERS, 8) */ MIN(customer_id) SOE_MIN_CUSTOMER_ID, MAX(customer_id) SOE_MAX_CUSTOMER_ID FROM customers

After adding the variables you should end up with something that looks similar to this

Tags: swingbench large schema indexes temp soe

I may regret this but it all seems to hang togther so I’ve decided to release 2.4 of swingbench. It dosen’t look significantly different from 2.3 but it has enough changes to warrant a point change. These include....

• New SH wizard
• New highly threaded benchmark builds for the OE and SH benchmarks
• New standard sizings for SOE and SH (1GB,10GB,100GB,1TB)
• Improved scalability of the SOE benchmark
• Oracle UCP connections
• New CPU monitor architecture (uses ssh instead of agent)
• Update look and feel on Overview charts (more coming)
• Configuration free install (Simply ensure Java is your path)

The first thing people are likely to notice is that you shouldn’t need to edit any files. As long as a 1.5 JVM is in your path you should just be able to start swingbench and the wizards. I’ve also tried to tidy things up in the directory structure and Im giving Apache launcher a go to try and centralise configuration. This may or may not work out Im already picking up a few issues.... But let me know how you find it.
The other big change is that I’’ve tried to standardise the benchmarks. You can now choose between 1GB,10GB,100GB or 1TB. The thing to watch out for is that this refers to the raw data size. The indexes add to this quite considerably. So a 1TB will require 3.2TB of disk space. The good news is that they are massively multi threaded now and so if you have the horse power (plenty of CPUs and IO) they should build relatively quickly (12 hours for a 1TB benchmark).
I’ve also updated the look of the overview graphs to make them a little punchier... I’ll be improving them still further shortly.
So now the stuff that’s a little broken....

• Charbench’s interactive mode seems to have cracked under the weight of all the updates. I have a fix for it but it requires a 1.6 JVM and Im trying to figure out if I can port it to 1.5. In the mean time you’ll have to use timers (-rt option) until I have a workable fix.
• Backgrounding tasks seems to be a little broken as well... I hope to have a fix for this shortly.

Also the stuff thats planned but didn’t quite make it.

• An end of run benchmark report. I’ve got it sort of working but it’s a little awkward looking.
• Update to coodinator controls...
• AIX cpu monitoring... I have the code. It just needs testing.

Let me know what you think here. You can download it here.

I’ve been doing some testing lately on some pretty fast servers of late, in particular Exadata V2. This has resulted in issues with the swingbench “SOE” benchmark that I hadn’t seen before such as data and index block contention and even some deadlocks (yes shame on me). So I took a look at the way the code worked and have updated it to use more efficient (and arguably more up to date) approaches to the same processes. The code still does the same number of selects,inserts and updates but removes some silly none scalable operations as well. This code will ship in swinbench 2.4 (yes I’ve decided to update to 2.4.... there’s a lot of changes) but I thought some people might find the new V1.1 version of the benchmark useful today so Im making it available on the downloads page. It should just be a simple update to the schema... i.e.

$> sqlplus soe/soe @soedgpackage.sql

Whilst this will fix a large number of problems you may need to reverse key a few indexes as well... (This will be part of the full installation in 2.4)

Let me know how you get on....

Best laid plans and all that.... I had hoped to release the new 2.4 build this week but work is insane at present and so I haven’t had time to do the necessary testing. It’s a pain I know. I have promised people releases a lot lately but work just gets busier and busier and since I can really only do swingbench development in my spare time Im struggling to keep up.

Im hoping things will die down in the next few weeks and so I should be able to get it done then. So if I don’t reply to emails it’s not being rude its just that I don’t have time... I’ll make it up I promise.