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7 Sizing and Best Practices for Online Transaction Processing Applications with Oracle 11g R2 using Dell PS Series | BP1003

1.3 Terminology

The following terms are used throughout this document:

AMM: The Oracle Automatic Memory Management (AMM) feature automates and simplifies the memory-

tuning configuration tasks by allowing you to manage the different memory components of Oracle using a

single database initialization parameter called MEMORY_TARGET.

ASM: Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is a volume manager and a file system that supports

Oracle database.

Group: One or more PS Series arrays connected to an IP network that work together to provide SAN

resources to host servers.

Member: A single physical PS Series array.

OLTP I/O pattern: OLTP workloads tend to select a small number of rows at a time. These transfers happen

anywhere in the data, and are each fairly small in size, typically between 8K and 64K. This causes the I/O

pattern to be random in nature.

The key metric in measuring performance of OLTP workloads is the number

of I/Os per second (IOPS) that can be achieved while maintaining a healthy response time.

ORION: Oracle I/O Numbers (ORION) is a popular I/O simulation tool used for understanding the I/O

performance behavior of storage systems for Oracle databases. The tool and documentation are included as

part of the Oracle 11g installation software.

Quest Benchmark Factory: This is a database performance tool which can simulate actual database

transactions such as TPC-C and TPC-E per the TPC specifications. More details on this tool and the

download location can be found at http://www.quest.com/benchmark-factory/.

SAN HQ: SAN Headquarters (SAN HQ) monitors one or more PS Series Groups. The tool is a client/server

application that runs on a Microsoft

Windows

system and uses the Simple Network Management Protocol

(SNMP) to query the groups. Much like a flight data recorder on an aircraft, SAN HQ collects data over time

and stores it on the server for later retrieval and analysis. Client systems connect to the server to format and

display the data in the SAN HQ GUI.

TPC-E: A benchmark developed by TPC to simulate OLTP database workloads. The TPC-E benchmark

simulates the OLTP workload of a brokerage firm. Although the underlying business model of TPC-E is a

brokerage firm, the database scheme, data population, transaction mix, and implementation rules broadly

represent a modern OLTP database system. More information on TPC-E can be found at

http://www.tpc.org/tpce/default.asp.

Vdbench: Vdbench is a disk and tape I/O workload generator specifically created to help engineers and

customers generate disk I/O workloads to be used for validating storage performance and storage data

integrity. The tool can be downloaded at the following link: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-

storage/vdbench-downloads-1901681.html

Data warehouse (DW) workloads, primarily composed of running database queries and generating reports, are sequential in nature. If

the same database is used for both transaction processing and report generation, a mix of OLTP and DW workloads will be observed.