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11g Real Application Testing (RAT)
Oracle 11g New Features Tips by Burleson
Consulting
June 27, 2008 |
Oracle 11g SQL New Features Tips
Applying any change to a production system is
the biggest challenge to administrators. This could be hardware
changes, patches applied to the OS, adding nodes to a cluster,
migrating from single instance to RAC or simply changed parameters
in the instance or different behavior of the optimizer after the
installation of Oracle Patches. It normally needs thorough testing
for weeks or even months before going live can be considered. The
three big “Ts” as Tom Kyte preaches are TESTING, TESTING, and
TESTING! The testing must happen under conditions which are as close
as possible to the real life conditions. If an application is needed
to serve 100 concurrent sessions, then it is necessary to test with
a concurrency of 100 and not with a scaled down workload but with a
real life workload.
This is exactly where the problems come in real
life. It is not that easy to create a realistic workload with all
the real time waiting and locking, concurrency and all in the right
sequence. There are workload simulators which are normally used for
benchmark testing like
Benchmark Factory
or even freeware like
Swingbench.
The problem is that these tools run a fictive, user defined workload
in multiple sessions at the same time but not a realistic workload
with all its concurrency and locking problems as they would occur on
a production system. This issue is one of the most important fields
for improvement in Oracle’s Database Release 11g. It is something
that a lot of customers have been demanding for a long time.
The
marketing expression for a number of new functionalities is
Real
Application Testing, or
RAT. Under this name, Oracle has again
subsumed two completely different
technologies:
-
Database Replay
-
SQL Performance Analyzer
Real Application Testing is only available with
Enterprise Edition ($ 40,000/Processor). It requires an EXTRA COST
LICENSE ($ 10,000/Processor). The Real Application
Testing Suite includes:
M
The Oracle Real Application
Testing license is required on both capture and replay systems for
Database Replay and is charged by the total number of CPUs on those
systems.
In this
chapter these two features, as well as new possibilities for the
maintenance of SQL plan stability by using SQL Plan Baselines, will
be covered beginning with the command line and then taking a look at
the graphical interface OEM.
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This is an
excerpt from the new book
Oracle 11g New Features: Expert Guide to the Important
New Features by John Garmany, Steve Karam, Lutz Hartmann, V. J.
Jain, Brian Carr.
You can buy it direct from the publisher
for 30% off. |
