Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Silly little Oracle Benchmark
Don't be fooled by the name—SLOB is one of the most interesting and hotly discussed Oracle-related storage
benchmarks you can get hold of. It has been released by Kevin Closson and has extensively been discussed on social
media and weblogs. SLOB is designed to test the Oracle storage backend and is available in source code. It relies on
a C-program's control, the execution of the actual benchmark work defined in shell scripts and SQL. Since its initial
release SLOB has been enhanced, and a new version of the benchmark has been released as SLOB 2. The following
section is about SLOB2 unless stated otherwise.
■
do not run SLoB outside your controlled lab environment! it has the potential to cause serious trouble,
such as creating severe queuing delays and a very noticeable performance hit on your shared storage system. the
purpose of this section is to give you a tool to
evaluate
storage solutions for your consolidation environment, before the
solution is deployed. So again, do not run SLoB outside your lab, especially not on non-lab storage (storage arrays)! also
ensure that you read the accompanying documentation carefully and make yourself comfortable with the implications of
running SLoB.
Caution
Before you can actually use SLOB, you need to perform some setup work. The first step is to create a database,
and then you load the test data. SLOB is made available here:
At the time of this writing, the May 5 release was current. Download and uncompress the file to a convenient
location on the server you want to benchmark. Let's assume you unzipped it to
/home/oracle/SLOB
.
Creating and Populating the SLOB Database
The first step when working with the tool is to create the database. For the purpose of our testing, the database will
be created as a regular database as opposed to a Container Database. You can read more about the various database
types available in Oracle 12.1 in Chapter 7. Despite SLOB being developed for databases pre-Oracle 12.1, you can use
the supplied init.ora and database creation script. Before you launch them, add the database to the oratab file,
for example:
SLOB:/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.1/dbhome_1:N
Next, review the initialization file to be found in
~/SLOB/misc/create_database_kit
. Change the file to match
your environment, especially with regards to the Oracle Managed Files (OMF) parameters. You should definitely
consider changing the value for compatible to 12.0 at least. You may also need to increase the value for processes. You
can optionally create a password file if you would like to connect remotely. Ensure that the directories referenced in
the initialization file exist and that the database owner has read-write permissions to them as well. The file used for
the below example is shown here for reference. Instead of Automatic Memory Management, as in the original create.
ora file, Automatic Shared Memory Management is used.
db_create_file_dest = '/u01/oradata/'
db_name = SLOB
compatible=12.1.0.1.0
UNDO_MANAGEMENT=AUTO
db_block_size = 8192
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