6 tips to make your life with Vagrant even better!

HashiCorp Vagrant is a great tool to quickly get up and running with a development environment. In this blog post I'll give some tips to make your life with Vagrant even better! You can find an example which uses these tips here.

Using Python to performancetest an Oracle DB

Performance testing is a topic with many opinions and complexities. You can not do it in a way which will make everyone happy. It is not straightforward to compare measures before and after a change. Environments are often not stable (without change in itself and its environment). When performing a test, the situation at the start or end of the test are also often not the same. For example the test might write data in a database.

There are various ways to look at performance. You can look at user experience, generate load similar to what application usage produces or you can do more basic things like query performance. What will you be looking at? Resource consumption and throughput are the usual suspects.

I'll look at a simple example in this blog post. I'll change database parameters and look at throughput of various actions which are regularly performed on databases. This takes away the complexity of distributed systems. I used a single Python script for this which can be downloaded here.

Summary of conclusions: Exposing database functionality using a DAD is not so much influenced by the tested settings. Setting FILESYSTEMIO_OPTIONS to SETALL improved the performance of almost all database actions. This has also been observed at different customers. Disabling Transparent HugePages and enabling the database to use HugePages seemed to have little effect. PL/SQL native compilation also did not cause a massive improvement. From the tested settings FILESYSTEMIO_OPTIONS is the easiest to apply. Query performance and actions involving a lot of data improved with all (and any of) these settings.