One time when I was a little boy, I was driving with my dad and we went over a bridge and there was a sign that read “Weight Limit 10 Tons”.  I asked my dad how they figure out how much load the bridge can handle.

My dad, being a dad, answered, “Well they build the bridge and then keep driving bigger and bigger trucks over it until it collapses.  They then weigh the truck and rebuild the bridge and post the sign.”  I was smart enough to know this was not the truth, but sadly this is the mentality many DBA’s take with their databases.

Many Databases are not properly tested to determine their scalability or load limits and these values are just estimated or guessed at.  In some cases they just buy more hardware than they really need and waste money that could be saved or used in other areas of their environment.  All too often the issue is not dealt with until the database crashes or is brought to its knees by unforeseen or unplanned capacity and load.

Quest’s Benchmark Factory for Databases essentially allows you to “Drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge to test it limits” in your database development and test environments and perform database load testing, capture workload and replay, industry-standard benchmark testing, and scalability testing.

 Benchmark Factory has many unique and powerful features that are easy to use and implement with a simple Wizard based GUI.  Benchmark Factory also provides simple and concise reporting to help understand and document your testing process.

 Benchmark Factory Features:

 Database workload generation

Understand future performance problems and do what-if analyses using actual transaction workloads. Simulate real-world production loads by taking production or synthetic activity, and replaying it in test or development environments.

Database code scalability testing

Evaluate how applications perform when deployed with real activity. Perform load tests on SQL scripts, PL/SQL, T-SQL code and stored procedures under different concurrent user configurations. Fix any code performance issues found before production deployment by integrating with SQL Optimizer.

 Industry-standard benchmark testing

Evaluate database scalability, test hardware/configurations and determine system throughput. Simulate real database application workloads using out-of-the-box, industry-standard benchmarks (TPC-H, TPC-C, TPC-D, TPC-E, ASP3AP and scalable hardware).

Virtual user and transaction load simulation

Quantify application or server performance, determine system throughput and find database breaking points by propagating user and transaction workloads on the system under test. Each user and transaction acts as a separate, independent thread with its own connection and statistics, including run times and transactions per second.

Benchmark Factory for Databases is a simplified, yet robust testing solution to help ensure database performance and avoid any collapses to your IT infrastructure.

Don’t let this be you!!!!

For More information on Benchmark Factory please check out Toad world or Quest.com

 

About the Author

Russell Tuttle

Quest Software

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