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.