The real applications testing database option that oracle introduced in Oracle 11g, has now been back ported for use with oracle 9i and 10g. Real application testing has two main components
- Database Replay
- Sql performance analyzer.
The database replay component helps customers capture actual real life workloads and gives them the ability to replay them on test or development systems to guage the effect of changes they are about to make (eg: change initializtion parameter, upgrade database version, move to new storage etc).
The Sql performance analyzer component helps customers to understand the effect of changes on sql statements. This component allows customers to capture sql statements and execution plans from a system and re-execute the sql statements on a test system (Where changes have been made) and then compare the performance of sql statements before and after the change. So if any sql statement regressions are found, the customer can then use the sql tuning assistant to tune such sql statements.
Based on popular demand oracle has backported the components of real applications testing to earlier releases.
The “Capture” portion of “Database Replay” has been backported for 9i and 10g. Meaning workloads can be captured from 9i or 10g databases and “Replay”‘ed on 11g databases. Please note that workloads cannot be “Replay”‘ed on 9i and 10g.
The “Sql performance Analyzer” component has been backported and made available for use with 9i and 10gR1 customers upgrading to 10gR2 or higher. So sql statements can be captured from 9i and 10gR1 and Re-run in 10gR2 and 11g and then the performance of both executions can be compared to identify regressions.
In any case where your target database is a 10g database, an intermediatory 11g database is required so that the “Database Replay” and “Sql performance analyzer” tasks can be executed on the 10gR2 database.
For details regarding using Real Application Testing with Pre-11g databases check the following documents
Technical note: Real application testing for earlier releases
Real Application testing for earlier releases (Metalink note)
