Real application testing with database replay

ABSTRACT

Oracle Database Replay provides a new way to test changes to a database system by reproducing the real user workload in a test environment. It helps to identify potential problems after software or hardware upgrades, patches, or changes to database parameters, schema or data. Any interesting workload period of a production database system can be captured with minimal overhead. The captured workload can be used to drive a test system while maintaining the concurrency and load characteristics of the real production workload. The replay does not depend on any other software including the application itself. It reliably reproduces the captured workload to support early diagnosis and troubleshooting. In this paper we discuss the analysis of replay results and introduce a new compare-period report, which assists with a detailed performance comparison of the capture and its replays with respect to changes. We demonstrate its usefulness in a case study involving an upgrade for a Siebel financial application, where Database Replay identifies performance problems after the upgrade and helps correcting them.

REFERENCES

• 1: Carsten Binnig , Donald Kossmann , Eric Lo , M. Tamer Özsu, QAGen: generating query-aware test databases, Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 11-14, 2007, Beijing, China [doi>10.1145/1247480.1247520]
• 2: Michael Emmi , Rupak Majumdar , Koushik Sen, Dynamic test input generation for database applications, Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Software testing and analysis, July 09-12, 2007, London, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1273463.1273484]
• 3: Leonidas Galanis , Supiti Buranawatanachoke , Romain Colle , Benoît Dageville , Karl Dias , Jonathan Klein , Stratos Papadomanolakis , Leng Leng Tan , Venkateshwaran Venkataramani , Yujun Wang , Graham Wood, Oracle database replay, Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 09-12, 2008, Vancouver, Canada [doi>10.1145/1376616.1376732]
• 4: HP LoadRunner. http://www.hp.com.
• 5: SQL Server Profiler, RDBMS Documentation, http://msdn.microsoft.com.
• 6: K. Yagoub, P. Belknap, B. Dageville, K. Dias, S. Joshi, and H. Yu. Oracle's SQL Performance Analyzer. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. March 2008 Vol. 31 No. 1

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Management, Measurement, Performance, Verification

Keywords:
capture, database, replay, testing