Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

This is a post announcing the release of SLOB 2.4!

VERSION

SLOB 2.4.0. Release notes (PDF): Click Here.

WHERE TO GET THE BITS

As always, please visit the SLOB Resources page. Click Here.

NEW IN THIS RELEASE

• Short Table Scans. This release introduces the ability to configure SLOB sessions to perform a percentage of all SELECT statements as full table scans against a small, non-indexed table. However, the size of the “scan table” is configurable.
• Statspack Support. This version, by default, generates STATSPACK reports instead of Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) reports. This means that SLOB testing can be conducted against Oracle Database editions that do not support AWR–as well as the ability to test Enterprise Edition with fewer software licensing concerns. AWR reports can be generated after a simple modification to the slob.conf file.
• External Script Execution. House-keeping of run results files and the ability to, for example,  issue a remote command to a storage array to commence data collection is introduced by the EXTERNAL_SCRIPT feature in SLOB 2.4.

ADDITIONAL CHANGES

SLOB 2.4 has been tested on public cloud configurations to include Amazon Web Services RDS for Oracle. SLOB 2.4 changes to slob.conf parameters, and other infrastructure, makes SLOB 2.4 the cloud predictability, and repeatability, testing tool of choice as of SLOB 2.4. Please visit the following page for a step-by-step guide for deploying SLOB on RDS for Oracle instances: click here.

ADDITIONAL INFO

Please see the SLOB 2.4 Documentation in the SLOB/doc directory. Or, click here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The SLOB 2.4 release came by way of non-trivial contributions from the SLOB community. I’m very thankful for the contributions and want to point out the following value added by several SLOB user community folks:

• Chris Osborne (@westendwookie). Chris provided a functional prototype of the new SLOB 2.4 Scan Table Feature. Thanks, Chris!
• Christian Antognini (@ChrisAntognini): Chris provided a functional prototype of the new SLOB 2.4 support for STATSPACK! Thanks, Chris!
• James Morle (@JamesMorle). James has helped with several scalability improvements in slob.sql based on his astonishing high-end SLOB testing. With thousands of sessions attached to a dozen or more state-of-the-art Xeon hosts connected to NVM storage led to several issues with proper start/stop synchronization and thus impacting repeatability. James also created the new SLOB 2.4 EXTERNAL_SCRIPT feature. As always, thanks, James!
• Maciej Przepiorka (@mPrzepiorka): Maciej conducted very thorough Beta testing and enhanced the EXTERNAL_SCRIPT feature in SLOB 2.4. Thanks, Maciej.
• Martin Berger (@martinberx): Martin conducted significant Standard Edition testing and also enhanced the SLOB/misc/awr_info.sh (SLOB/misc/statspack_info.sh) script for producing performance data, in tuple form, from STATSPACK. Thanks, Martin!