HammerDB

HammerDB is a popular benchmarking and stress testing software for many of the most popular databases, supporting Oracle Database, SQL Server, IBM Db2, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. HammerDB offers various features such as:

• Complex transactional and analytic workloads based on industry standards
• Bulk data generation and schema build to populate the database
• GUI and command line interface that offers full automation
• Database insights with metrics and performance reports

We used HammerDB to run OLTP workloads on all our database instances.

Test environment

The Test environment consists of Windows Server 2016 VMs with HammerDB installed. These VMs are only used as clients (simulating users) to generate the load and are not on PowerFlex compute nodes. HammerDB VMs and MariaDB instances are on the same network. Initially, MariaDB instances are each populated with around 1700 warehouses (approx. 160 GB of data) by running the schema build from HammerDB. 

Figure 4.   HammerDB workload generation on MariaDB VMs

Once the data is populated, a series of tests is done with varying numbers of virtual users from 10 to 60. Each HammerDB is connected to one MariaDB server. The test is seven minutes long with the first two minutes taken for ramp up, and workload run the for remaining five minutes. It is to be noted that workload is run on all 1700 warehouses simultaneously.