Transactional database workload

SwingBench was used for the transactional database workload.

For more information, see:

https://www.dominicgiles.com/downloads.html

SwingBench is a free load generator (and benchmarks) designed to stress test an Oracle Database (10g,11g). The code that ships with SwingBench includes four benchmarks, and these are OrderEntry, SalesHistory, CallingCircle, StressTest. For the tests, the OrderEntry benchmark was selected, which is a transactional workload.

The transactional database workload is driven by an external client (running on a x86 server under Linux) that communicates with the Oracle Database within the z/VM Linux guest using JDBC type IV connectors over the network.

The Oracle Database was configured using ASM as disk storage management tool, as follows:

Two disk groups: one for data disks and one for log disks.
Four 64 GiB data disks within the data disk group
One 64 GiB log disk within the log disk group

The SwingBench oewizard tool was used to create the database elements required for the OrderEntry workbench, selecting a tablespace datafile target within the data disk group, and using a User Defined Scale of 30, resulting in a total size of disk space of about 96 GiB.

The transactional database workload was customized for producing specific loads on memory and I/O resources. The workload parameters are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Transactional database workload parameters
Parameter	Name	Value
number of SwingBench users	`-uc`	varied between 32 and 600
virtual system size	`vmsize`	varied between 4GiB and 32GiB
Oracle Database memory target	`memory_target`	varied between 1616MiB and 22GiB

The memory_target parameter controls the amount of memory used by the Oracle Database by specifying the database system-wide usable memory.