Release 2.1 for Windows
The author is Steve Shaw who can be contacted at
Hammerora has been designed as an Oracle only tool and does not compromise on performance for generality. Hammerora interacts with the Oracle database using the OCI based Oratcl and web based environments using TclCurl. Hammerora can therefore test all aspects of your Oracle enviroment including database and application server. For databases Hammerora can convert real Oracle trace files and replay them back with multiple users using Oratcl. There are also pre-built simluations based on the TPC-C and TPC-H benchmark specifcations in order that there are multi-user workloads that you can begin to use straight away.
TCL has been used as it
provides high performance associated with the C programming language
that the language is written in without the inconvenience or expertise
required to recompile generated load testing programs. TCL is also
exceptionaly light on system resources meaning that a notebook or
desktop system can easily load test a powerful database or application
server environment. The power, flexibility and extensibility of
TCL means that the potential functionality is unlimited and its 'hot
pluggable' architecture means any required functionality can be added
to the multi-threaded user framework enabled by TCL
Threads. For example users looking to test TimesTen may wish to
investigate the TclODBC
package.
When working with
HTML testing you will need the script
to specify that it needs the TclCurl package. This example below shows
the in-built TPC-C driver script specifying that it needs the Oratcl
package. More information on getting started with these scripts is
available on the documentation page. When
you have a working script you will need to create a number of virtual
users who will run the workload you have written. To create the virtual
users enter the values in the Vuser options dialog box selected under
the Virtual Users menu (see the XML configuration file details on the
documentation page for a description of the fields) and press the Load
Virtual Users button. These virtual users
are implemented as separate threads and thereby run independently of
each other (although it is easy to communicate between the threads or
direct threads to run different workloads if desired). The
following shows Hammerora with a loaded script and an number of
virtual users created and ready to run the workload.
On opting to run a
Hammeora load test by pressing the Run
Hammerora Loadtest button the icons of the
virtual users will change to show the actions that each user is taking
at that moment in time. The following image shows a number of virtual
users all currently busy executing the workload chosen.
You also have the
option when creating the virtual users
to display the output of each virtual user individually and to
optinally log the output to a text file. The output screen will display
in a grid format the most recent output of all the users you have
created.
If the workload
completes successfully the status will be
displayed as such within the virtual user status.
Similarly if there is an uncaught error the status will also be displayed for the virtual users. If errors occur the error message will be displayed in the console. The following example shows that the virtual users could not log on becasue the service name in the connect string was incorrect.
It is worth
re-iterating that each virtual user operates
independently within its own thread resulting in a highly efficient
environment for genrating multi-user simultations to load test Oracle
environments.
It is now recommended
to proceed to the documentation page to learn more about getting
started with using Hammerora.