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Thursday, December 6, 2012

Swingbench is great! (but not descriptive when there's an error.)

Just a quick note that may help some of you using Swingbench in distributed mode.  For those of you that haven't used it yet, Swingbench is a great way to compare performance of different Oracle databases running on different platforms or configurations.  The best part is...its free:

http://www.dominicgiles.com/swingbench.html

There are two ways to do it...one is a simple test from your laptop...the other is for a distributed RAC database, in order to push it and see when its bottlenecks are (and to make sure your laptop isn't introducing a bottleneck) You can get the details and a walk through from the author's site (link above), but essentially you have multiple groups connecting to the database directly to specific nodes, then their results are aggregated into the "coordinator process"...and its results are displayed by the cluster overview process.  When I was doing this last night I got this error and was unable to find help on "the internets":

11:33:11 AM FINEST com.dom.benchmarking.swingbench.clusteroverview.datasource.S calabilityDataSource () Connected java.lang.NullPointerException at com.dom.benchmarking.swingbench.clusteroverview.datasource.Transactio nDataSource.updateResultsArray(TransactionDataSource.java:148) at com.dom.benchmarking.swingbench.clusteroverview.datasource.TransactionDataSource.run(TransactionDataSource.java:177) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

I was doing a distributed swingbench test and the workload generators I was using (charbench), were all using the same swingconfig.xml over a shared NFS mount, which had a typo in the connect string...so I ended up having no connections. I can only guess this might be what the java error was trying to say with the "null pointed exception on update of the results array of the transaction data source." For my situation (and maybe yours) I consider this an "unable to connect to database" error...if you hit this issue, check the connect string in swingconfig.xml.

I hope this helps!