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28 Sizing and Best Practices for Online Transaction Processing Applications with Oracle 11g R2 using Dell PS Series | BP1003
6 OLTP performance studies using TPC-E like workload
The ORION and Vdbench test results described in section 5 helped in determining the baseline performance
of a typical Oracle OLTP database on PS Series arrays. Also, ORION and Vdbench are both synthetic I/O
workload generation tools and they do not use the actual Oracle stack.
In this phase of testing, Quest Benchmark Factory for Databases simulated a real TPC-E-style workload on
the test systems using an actual 2-node Oracle 11g R2 RAC database. The TPC-E-style workload was
executed using PS6110XS hybrid arrays.
Some of the key configuration details for the database are described below:
Used a single PS6110XS array for hosting Oracle database and REDO log files. One more PS6110E
array was used to configure the archive and flashback recovery area.
Installed Oracle 11g R2 clusterware on the two Dell EMC PowerEdge™ R720 database servers. The
logical test configuration is described section 3.1.
The database elements, REDO logs, archive, and flash data were managed using Oracle ASM. More
details on disk layout are available in section 3.3.
A TPC-E-like database was populated with a scaling factor of 50 using Quest Benchmark Factory.
6.1 Oracle memory management study
The most important and complex aspect of system tuning for maximizing Oracle database performance is
memory management. With the Oracle 11g release, the Automatic Memory Management (AMM) feature was
introduced to help automate and simplify this configuration tuning task by allowing you to manage the System
Global Area (SGA) and Program Global Area (PGA) components using a single database initialization
parameter called MEMORY_TARGET.
However, it remains a challenge for database administrators to determine the recommended value to be set
for MEMORY_TARGET to achieve optimal database performance. Also, the memory requirements of a
database server vary depending on the type of I/O workload. These tests were run using different AMM
memory settings to determine the configuration which produces optimal performance for TPC-E-like I/O.