Tuesday, May 5, 2009

COLLABORATE 09: SwingBench

Session: Q352
Presenter: Debra Scarpelli
Time: 12:15-12:45
Room: 224 G
Title: A "Stress-Free" Free Stress Testing Tool From Oracle

I saw this on the schedule "free" jumped out at me. I don't believe the schedule made any mention of the tool, but I could be wrong.

Swingbench

I've read or seen about this somewhere but never got around to investigating it.

For those that don't know, it's a level load testing tool for the Oracle database. It was written by Dominic Giles (of Oracle). It has been used by Oracle internally for a time that I am unable to determine. You can find the page for it here. This tool is free but it is not supported by Oracle.

Specifics
- Currently works against 9i, 10g and 11g
- Built in Java and works on Unix, Linux and Windows
- Can use against RAC, TimesTen and Stand-alone databases.
- Three interfaces, command line (charbench), a mini GUI (minibench) and SwingBench (full fledged GUI)
  - SwingBench interface provides real-time feedback

There are 4 supplied (pre-configured) benchmark tests:
- Calling Circle with a read/write ratio of 70/30
- Order Entry with a read/write ratio of 60/40
- Stress Test with a read/write ratio of 50/50
- Sales History with a read/write ratio of 100/0

You can also write your own.

To run it you need to have Java (not sure which version) and the Oracle client installed on your machine. The output is xml so you can do pretty much anything you want with that.

There are some other tools that you can use in conjunction which you can find on Dominic Giles site.
- Data Generator
- BMCompare (yes, I snickered too) which compares the results of 2 benchmark tests.
- TraceAnalyzer

Pretty cool little tool. I'm definitely going to give it a try to see how it works and what it can teach me.

1 comment:

Doug Burns said...

I've personally found Swingbench really useful for playing around with performance. It's straightforward to set up and get going quickly, but extensible, too.

Recommended. Have fun with it!

Oh, but you could take a look at HammerOra, too.