Workload description

The workload used in this study emulated business processing transactions generated by many active users. These users accessed a single database to process warehouse orders, manage inventory, and bill customers.

The workload was configured with a zero amount of think time, the pauses between events that occur when humans interactively start transactions. This results in an intensive load from a single user and up to 120 users are used in the test environment. This is similar to a much larger number of connected users in a real setting. The level of utilization could be compared to that of a database working as the backend of an application server, or a transaction concentrator.

The workloads used in this study run in a mode that intentionally creates contention in the disk I/O subsystem. This ensures that changes in the disk I/O capacity impact the transactional throughput, which allows the impact of the various setup modifications to be monitored accurately.