Tag: Testing
September 5

XMLDB Performance: Environment, Set-up, Procedure

There has some time past since my last update on my XMLDB Performance, tuning, adventure. As you maybe have read, I had my problems to set-up a decent test environment and loading XML data. I am testing with an Mediawiki XML dumpfile. If there is a problem or a side effect to notice than I have a big chance that it will show up if not only by the size of this Mediawiki XML dumpfile. The Mediawiki XML dumpfile contains, when I downloaded it, almost 8 million records and has a file size on Windows NT NFS of 17,4 Gigabyte.

Loading this data via the procedures described in my posts, “HOWTO: Load Really Big XML Files” and “Setting Up an XMLDB Performance “Baseline” Environment (Part 02)” dealt with some of the issues I encountered to realize controllable testing set-up. Loading this amount of XML data will take some time.

Read the postXMLDB Performance: Environment, Set-up, Procedure
July 15

Setting Up an XMLDB Performance “Baseline” Environment

I just read Thomas Kyte’ s blog post “Read This“, which is dealing with the content of the blog post of Cary Millsap. As Tom phrased it:

I liked what Cary Millsap just said:

I don’t mean “show and tell,” where someone claims he has improved performance at hundreds of customer sites by hundreds of percentage points [sic], so therefore he’s an expert.

I mean show your work, which means documenting a relevant baseline measurement, conducting a controlled experiment, documenting a second relevant measurement, and then showing your results openly and transparently so that your reader can follow along and even reproduce your test if he wants to.

This is more or less funny, because I read Cary’s post, be apparently I didn’t read it… I can really relate to it now.

I am in the middle of setting up a XMLDB test environment to test, among others, load times while using different kinds off XMLType storage based upon CLOB, Object Relational and Binary XML (using Basicfile / Securefile options). And although I am working on a VMware environment, I noticed that it isn’t that easy to setup a “controlled experiment“. What makes it harder is, that I am using the Mediawiki XML English dumpfile, that contains roundabout 7 million records (17 Gb of ASCII data). This makes it more interesting, and the effects more clearer, but it also takes much more time to do stuff.

Read the postSetting Up an XMLDB Performance “Baseline” Environment