HammerORA

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPPC) provides some of the most comprehensive and industry standard techniques to test/benchmark database/application performance. However, I realized that TPPC only provides the specifications for the standard tests, not their implementations. There are commercial implementations available, but here's , my experience so far with HammerORA.

This free tool implements a large part of the TPC-C benchmarking tests apart from providing some other powerful Oracle bashing treats as well. A lot of articles are available on the internet - some of the following got me going part of the way:

• http://www.ba6.us/node/82
  
• http://www.otmfaq.com/forums/blogs/chrisplough/11-benchmarking-part-2-oracle-db-performance-hammerora.html

Dave' and Chris did a great job describing the installation and execution process. The following were some minor additions to their instructions that may help future users, especially if you're installing on Windows:

1) It seems necessary to install hammerora inside the Oracle (Oracle Express in my case) installation folders or set up an ORACLE_HOME environment variable. In my case having installed Oracle Express 10g under the C: drive my ORACLE_HOME environment variable needed to be set to "C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\10.2.0"

2) The target Oracle RAC instance needs to be correctly set up in the Oracle tnsnames.ora file.
3) The latest version of hammerora may not need the tablespace, user etc to be set up by hand, but if people do need to do it, and if you're following Dave's instructions, then for his 'Create Schema' section you need to include the tablespace creation for TPCC. Dave's handled TPCH correctly I think.