Daily Archives Saturday, April 2008

Warm, snowy Denver

Readers of the other blog, the more technical one, will know that I have been at Collaborate 08 in Denver, CO. I’ll write about the presentation itself over on the Rittman Mead blog - and I’ll post up the paper so that the interested can take a look.
When I was booking my flights I found [...]

Find AppsLab at Web 2.0 Expo Next Week

The whole ‘Lab will be at Web 2.0 Expo next week, April 22-25 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
That’s the same venue as OpenWorld and pretty every other tech conference. In Denver, Paul riffed that he was sick of going to Moscone for conferences, something to the effect of “it’s getting old”. It is [...]

Swingbench

A short post in praise of Swingbench. (There’s much more information at that link.)

Without this utility, demonstrating performance problems during the course would have been much more difficult so I owe Dominic Giles. It’s simple to set up using one small configuration file to set up environment variables, a JVM and an Oracle client installation. It’s supplied with 4 usable benchmark applications which are useful to demonstrate different aspects of Instance behaviour.

SH - Sales History application based on the Oracle-supplied SH schema. A read-only benchmark.
CC and SOE - OLTP-type applications
Stress Test - basic INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE/SELECT test.

It’s easy to change the number of sessions, think time, load of different parts of the application and as it’s a framework, you can use it to test your own PL/SQL-based apps.

The only problem I’ve run into is getting the Overview screen to work properly on all benchmarks but I suspect that the problem lurks in one of the XML files describing the benchmarks or my JVM. Still working on that one.

As I said, I owe Dominic, so take a look as it’s very easy to try and if it serves you as well as it has me, there’s a Paypal donation link on Dominic’s site ;-) Anyone who comes to any of my presentations this year is likely to get a chance to see Swingbench in action.