With the surge in the number of Database-as-a-Service providers in the market today, many DBaaS providers claim to offer competitive database performance for your applications. The only true way of evaluating the performance of the database is by running performance benchmarks for the databases running on the cloud. In this article, we run performance benchmarks to evaluate, analyze, and compare the performance of Oracle database engines running on the AWS cloud for Tessell. We have used the SLOB benchmarking tool for the benchmarking process.
Before starting the benchmarking process, you need to get your environment ready.
Prepare your environment
To prepare the environment for the benchmarking process, perform the following high-level tasks:
Provision a Tessell RDS Oracle instance to benchmark the performance testing. We are using the Tessell shape “tesl_8h_a” on the AWS cloud. This shape comes with 8 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM. While provisioning the instance, note down the username and password to connect to your database instance.
Launch or create an Amazon EC2 instance to install the SLOB benchmarking tool, and set up the load. It is recommended that you create the instance in the same Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as your Tessell RDS instance to keep the latency minimum.
Set up the security groups for the client and server machines in a way that the client machine can connect to the server machine over the database port TCP:1521. For more information, see Default security groups for your VPC.
The following diagram shows the recommended environment for running the benchmarking process. The VPC located in the AWS cloud contains the Tessell RDS Oracle instance and the SLOB client installed in the Amazon EC2 instance.
Provision the Oracle client machine
Firstly, provision the client Linux machine to install the SLOB benchmarking tool. For our test, we provisioned the Amazon Linux instance with the following configuration details:
Copied to clipboard!
Image: RHEL_HA-8.4.0_HVM-20210504-x86_64-2-Hourly2-GP2
Shape: m5.2xlarge
VPC: Same as the DB Service
Download SLOB and Install Oracle Client
Secondly, download the SLOB benchmarking tool on the provisioned instance and Oracle Client. To do so, perform the following steps:
1. Download and install Oracle database client RPM.
4. Unzip the Oracle database client software and update response file.
Copied to clipboard!
cd /tmp
unzip LINUX.X64_213000_client.zip
cd /tmp/client/response
cat client_install.rsp
# Uodate client_install.rsp
UNIX_GROUP_NAME=dba
INVENTORY_LOCATION=/u02/app/oraInventory
ORACLE_HOME=/u02/app/oracle/product/dbhome_1
ORACLE_BASE=/u02/app/oracle
oracle.install.client.installType=Administrator
5. Install the Oracle client.
Copied to clipboard!
cd /tmp/client
./runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs -showProgress -silent -responseFile /tmp/client/response/client_install.rsp
Run the orainstRoot.sh as root user.
sudo /u02/app/oraInventory/orainstRoot.sh
6. Update the TNS connection and set the following environment variables. Get the service URL from Tessell GUI to set as HOST in the TNS connection.
7. Test the sqlplus connection by running the following command:
Copied to clipboard!
$ sqlplus master/xxxxx@orcl
SQL*Plus: Release 21.0.0.0.0 - Production on Thu Apr 13 14:49:28 2023
Version 21.3.0.0.0
Copyright (c) 1982, 2021, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 19.18.0.0.0
SQL> show user
USER is "MASTER"
SQL>
8. Note: To increase the average IOPS, update the below parameters on the Oracle database.
Copied to clipboard!
SQL> show parameter DB_WRITER_PROCESSES
NAME TYPE VALUE
------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------
db_writer_processes integer 16
SQL> show parameter db_cache_size
NAME TYPE VALUE
------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------
db_cache_size big integer 32G
SQL>
9. Download the SLOB source code by using wget.
Install the wget tool and clone the SLOB project to your instance.
Copied to clipboard!
sudo yum install wget -y
cd /u02
wget 'https://github.com/therealkevinc/SLOB_2.5.4/archive/refs/heads/main.zip'
Extract the SLOB source code files.
Copied to clipboard!
cd /u02
unzip main.zip
cd SLOB_2.5.4-main/
tar -zxvf 2021.05.12.slob_2.5.4.0.tar.gz
cp -rf SLOB/ /u02
Run the benchmark
Before you run the benchmark, configure the SLOB configuration file and start the Setup (load schemas), and
Open the <code>/u02/SLOB/slob.conf</code> file and replace the default parameter values with the following values:
Copied to clipboard!
UPDATE_PCT=15
RUN_TIME=3600
SCALE=4G
WORK_UNIT=256
LOAD_PARALLEL_DEGREE=16
DATABASE_STATISTICS_TYPE=awr # Permitted values: [statspack|awr]
ADMIN_SQLNET_SERVICE=orcl
SQLNET_SERVICE_BASE=orcl
DBA_PRIV_USER="MASTER"
SYSDBA_PASSWD="******" # Type your password here
For more information about the SLOB configuration parameter, see the README.
Start setting up SLOB and load schemas by running the following command:
Copied to clipboard!
sudo su - oracle
cd /u02/SLOB/wait_kit
make all
cd /u02/SLOB
nohup ./setup.sh MASTER_TBS 128 &
This loads approximately 525 GB of slob database.
Run the performance test with the following command:
Copied to clipboard!
nohup ./runit.sh -s 128 -t 1 &
Results
When the performance test completes, the IOPS achieved from the database transaction is displayed on the last line. When we ran our test on Tessell RDS and AWS RDS, we got the following results:
It is, therefore, safe to conclude that Tessell RDS produced 1,103% higher IOPS as compared to AWS RDS for the identical SLOB workload at the same cost. The image below depicts the visual comparison of the performance benchmark results that Tessell RDS and AWS RDS produce:
