Dear Readers,

Trust you are doing well.

Today, I’ll be discussing one of Oracle’s standout features—a powerful tool for testing real-time performance without necessarily involving application teams.

DRAWBACKS OF USING TRADITIONAL PERFORMANCE TESTING

• This necessitates the procurement of redundant hardware for the entire application stack, encompassing web servers, application servers, and databases, in order to assess production applications thoroughly.
• Moreover, despite customers conducting thorough testing, unforeseen issues often arise when implementing changes in the production system. This is attributed to simulated test workloads that tend to be incomplete and inaccurate representations of actual production workloads.
• Achieving precise performance results requires tight coordination among different application teams, network teams, and middleware teams.
• Typically, testing smaller changes with substantial impacts, such as parameter adjustments or the creation of new indices, is prohibitively expensive.

ADVANTAGES OF USING ORACLE REAL APPLICATION TESTING (RAT)

• Real Application Testing empowers you to assess the impact of a system change on a workload without disrupting the production system.
• This Oracle feature substantially boosts the productivity of database administrators, providing a straightforward and efficient means of validating changes to the database environment.
• It eliminates the necessity for the involvement of multiple teams in the testing process, offering a hassle-free and expeditious approach to conducting performance tests.

LICENSING

• Oracle Real Application Testing is an additional cost feature available for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition (EE).
• The license for Oracle Real Application Testing is mandatory on both the capture and replay systems for Database Replay, and the cost is determined by the total number of CPUs on these systems.
• The utilization of Capture and Replay ASH Analytics Reports, Compare Period ADDM Reports, and Replay Compare Period Reports necessitates an Oracle Diagnostics Pack license.
• With an Oracle Real Application Testing license, you gain access to Database Replay functionality through both Oracle Enterprise Manager and the command line.
• Similarly, it allows access to SQL Performance Analyzer functionality through Oracle Enterprise Manager and the command line.

ORACLE REAL APPLICATION TESTING (RAT) OVERVIEW

Utilizing Oracle Real Application Testing enables the capture of a workload from the production system, which can then be replayed on a test system, mirroring the precise timing, concurrency, and transaction characteristics of the original workload. This process involves capturing the workload on the production system and replicating it on a test system.

HIGH-LEVEL STEPS INVOLVED IN RAT

• Capturing the real-time workload takes place on the production/source system.
• Subsequently, workload processing occurs on the pre-production/target system to prepare the environment for replay.
• The workload replay, encompassing both Data Manipulation Language (DML) operations and SQL queries, is then executed on the pre-production/target system to simulate the captured workload.
• Finally, analysis and reporting are conducted based on the completed Oracle Real Application Testing (RAT) replay run.

In Part 2, I will eloborate on Workload capture procedure.

Let me know for any questions and any further information in comments or LinkedIn.

Regards
Adityanath.