SLOB 2.3 is soon to be released. This version has a lot of new, important features but also a significant amount of tuning in the data loading kit. Before sharing where the progress is on that front, I’ll quickly list some of the new important features that will be in SLOB 2.3:
- Single Schema Support. SLOB historically avoids application-level contention by having database sessions perform the SLOB workload against a private schema. The idea behind SLOB is to exert maximum I/O pressure on storage while utilizing the minimum amount of host CPU possible. This lowers the barrier to entry for proper testing as one doesn’t require dozens of processors festering in transactional SQL code just to perform physical I/O. That said, there are cases where a single, large active data set is desirable–if not preferred. SLOB 2.3 allows one to load massive data sets quickly and run large numbers of SLOB threads (database sessions) to drive up the load on the system.
- Advanced Hot Spot Testing. SLOB 2.3 supports configuring each SLOB thread such that every Nth SQL statement operates on a hot spot sized in megabytes as specified in the slob.conf file. Moreover, this version of SLOB allows one to dictate the offset for the hot spot within the active data set. This allows one to easily move the hot spot from one test execution to the next. This sort of testing is crucial for platform experts studying hybrid storage arrays that identify and promote “hot” data into flash for example.
- Threaded SLOB. SLOB 2.3 allows one to have either multiple SLOB schemas or the new Single Schema and to drive up the load one can specify how many SLOB threads per schema will be active.
To close out this short blog entry I’ll make note that the SLOB 2.3 data loader is now loading 1TB scale Single Schema in just short of one hour (55.9 minutes exactly). This procedure includes data loading, index creation and CBO statistics gathering. The following was achieved with a moderate IVB-EP 2s20c40t server running Oracle Linux 6.5 and Oracle Database 12c and connected to an EMC XtremIO array via 8GFC Fibre Channel. I think this shows that even the data loader of SLOB is a worthwhile workload in its own right.
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
Hi Kevin, How is SLOB 2.3 coming along?
I was hoping to use it to benchmark Xtremio vs another flash storage vendor vs our current storage.
Thanks!
it’s beta …are you a SLOB user now?
Hi there …
Not sure why am I getting ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied
SQLNET_SERVICE_BASE: “appprd”
SQLNET_SERVICE_MAX: “2”
Testing connectivity. Command: “sqlplus -L user1/user11”
when I comment out sqlnet_service_max, it works fine, but all connections go to a single instance in a 2 node cluster.
What am I missing, please?
Do you have a service somewhere called “appprd1” and “appprd2” ? That’s what SLOB wants to connect to when you set SQLNET_SERVICE_MAX=2.
If you have a round-robin service called “appprd” then you can comment out SQLNET_SERVICE_MAX and all connections will got to “appprd” which should round-robin the connections for you.
Please consider the above facts and reply here. Also, to help further I’ll need to see your entire slob.conf and your invocation option/args for runit.sh. Something tells me this is not cut/paste of screen output because SLOB would not try to connect to schema user1 with a password of user11.