{"id":1156,"date":"2022-06-27T15:43:34","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T15:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hammerdb.com\/blog\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2022-07-05T16:49:48","modified_gmt":"2022-07-05T16:49:48","slug":"hammerdb-for-managers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hammerdb.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/hammerdb-for-managers\/","title":{"rendered":"HammerDB for Managers"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is targeted towards the questions most often asked by non-technical management who want to get up to speed on what HammerDB is (what it isn’t) and how it can benefit their organization.<\/p>\n

What is HammerDB?<\/h3>\n

HammerDB is a software application for database benchmarking.\u00a0 It enables the user to measure database performance and make comparative judgements about database hardware and software.<\/p>\n

HammerDB has graphical and command line interfaces for the Windows and Linux operating systems.<\/p>\n

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Why HammerDB was developed<\/h3>\n

Databases are highly sophisticated software, and to design and run a fair benchmark workload is a complex undertaking. The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) was founded to bring standards to database benchmarking, and the history of the TPC can be found here<\/a>. The TPC designed benchmarks for transaction processing (OLTP) and analytics (OLAP) and anyone can run these benchmarks, have them audited by the TPC and published on the official benchmark rankings.<\/p>\n

However, although these results are the gold standard of database benchmarking to do so, requires time, expertise and not insignificant cost. Additionally, many databases contain a license clause colloquially known as a De-Witt<\/a> clause that prevents the publication of non-approved benchmarks.<\/p>\n

These factors meant that often when looking for database performance information, the results for a particular combination of software and hardware were not available.<\/p>\n

As the TPC makes its specifications available for free, the need was seen for an open source benchmarking application that could leverage the standards written by the TPC yet implemented quickly, easily and at low cost by anyone. Also, when testing a database with a De-Witt clause, it was then possible to produce your own results without having to rely on a particular vendor to publish results of interest.<\/p>\n

The HammerDB name<\/h3>\n

Originally, HammerDB was named\u00a0 Hammerora because the first database the application supported was Oracle. Ora was a common prefix\/suffix for Oracle related software, and the name inspired by a genre of classic films<\/a> and the characters portrayed, in particular for testing Oracle RAC.\u00a0 As more databases were added, the original name was less appropriate and the name HammerDB was suggested and adopted.<\/p>\n

HammerDB development<\/h3>\n

HammerDB was originally developed by Steve Shaw<\/a> as an employer approved\u00a0 own-time, own-materials project to implement workloads derived from TPC specifications in a user accessible way.\u00a0 An important concept was to simulate database users called Virtual Users in parallel (rather than concurrently) to accurately simulate a real database workload with multiple users running from separate systems. Programming languages such as Java, Lua and Python were unable to support this unique requirement (an application to simulate separate users in multiple threads that do not block or pause each other’s workloads, the Python GIL for example only permits one user to run at any one time) and the design decisions made are discussed in the following post.<\/p>\n

What programming languages does HammerDB use and why does it matter?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n