SAP ASE Workload Analyzer Whitepaper
The SAP ASE Workload Analyzer feature was introduced in the ASE Cockpit for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise version 16.0 SP02 release. This is a powerful feature that enables users to analyze the performance of production applications and to replay the production workload in a variety of test environments to determine the effects of changes in SAP ASE server configuration, database design, software version changes or operating system environment changes.
The SAP ASE Workload Analyzer Whitepaper provides an overview of the benefits and features of the SAP ASE Workload Analyzer feature.
Please use this link to download the SAP ASE Workload Analyzer whitepaper.
Also, see the SAP ASE Workload Analyser Users Guide for more detailed information about installing and using SAP ASE Workload Analyzer.
Contact your SAP Sales representative with any questions about using or licensing this feature.
Mark,
The Replay Engine is part of the ASE Cockpit for ASE 16.0 SP02 or later and that version of ASE Cockpit does not support ASE 15.7, so it is not possible to replay captured workload against earlier versions of ASE.
Your procedure for recreating the production environment in the replay/test setup is correct except I do not see a need to generate or restore the transaction log (for the purpose of using the Workload Analyzer). When you capture the workload, all DML that generated changes in the production database will be captured (unless you have filtered them out on purpose). In order to replay this workload you need to restore the application database to the state that it was in at the time that the capture was started. The replay will apply all changes that occurred during the capture period.
When replay encounters errors, these will be reported in the Replay Status dialog but the replay will continue. The replay can be terminated manually if desired. The errors will also be included in the captured workload for the replay session (if capture is enabled during replay) and the errors can be analyzed as part of the analysis of the replay session.
The replay engine is fully multi-threaded and establishes the same number of connections performing the same operations as were used during the original workload. You may see deadlocks and other interactions between these connections. We have tested with over 2000 connections. There is no fixed limit to the number of connections but the maximum number of connections will be determined by the amount of memory available to the Java virtual machine used by the Replay Engine.
The additional ASE license provided with the Workload Analyzer license includes the semantic partitioning entitlement. I don't know all details of the ASE license but it is sufficient to operate the Workload Analyzer Repository, Note that during operations such as analysis and replay the load on the Workload Analyzer Repository ASE server will be substantial and this will affect other activity on this server. For this reason, we do not recommend using this server to support any other applications.
It is possible to have an active replication agent on the replay server.
Thank you for your questions. I hope that I have answered them.
- Peter