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The engineering team conducted internal load testing to determine the workload profile before starting the validation tests. HammerDB was used to generate an Online Transaction Processing Workload (OLTP) that simulates many common enterprise applications. The goal of generating a significant load on the SQL Server infrastructure was to ensure that the system was sufficiently taxed to demonstrate that best practices optimized performance. In this case, the initial target was six VMs each with ten processor cores. The HammerDB workload configuration is described in the below table.
Table 1. HammerDB workload configuration
Setting name | Value |
Total transactions per user | 1,000,000 |
Number of warehouses | 5,000 |
Number of virtual users | 80 |
Minutes of ramp up time | 10 |
Minutes of test duration | 50 |
Use all warehouses | Yes |
User delay (ms) | 500 |
Repeat delay (ms) | 500 |
Iterations | 1 |
With this HammerDB configuration, each best practice was validated in an hour-long workload test: 10 minutes ramp up time plus 50 minutes for test duration. We chose to run the workload for one hour to ensure that the database system reached a consistent performance state. Reaching a consistent run state determines whether the configuration is stable, and the best practice prove value over time.
The HammerDB parameter Use all warehouses enables increased I/O to the database area by assigning all the warehouses to the virtual users. The result of forcing the use of all warehouses means the workload will generate more I/O on the storage subsystem. The first set of best practices compares baseline database performance without an optimal storage configuration to a database configuration with an optimal storage configuration.
The metrics New Order per Minute (NOPM) and Transaction per Minute (TPM) help us interpret our results. These metrics are from the TPC-C benchmark and indicate the result of a test. During our best practice validation, we compared these metrics against the baseline to ensure that there is an increase in performance.