OATS: All Things about OLT Sessions

Oracle Load Testing(OLT)^[1] is a component of Oracle Application Test Suite (OATS), which can simulate hundreds of virtual users accessing the application simultaneously and measures the effect of the load on application performance.

The results of load tests are grouped by sessions which are stored in Oracle database.  Oracle Load Testing then allows you to create customized post-run reports on the results of your load tests.

ORA-01654

After you've run many load tests, eventually you could run into:

ORA-01654: unable to extend index OLT.COUNTERRUN_IDX by 1024 in tablespace USERS

OLT comes with a Session Manager which allows you to manage session data in the database:

• Edit
• Displays the Edit Session dialog box for changing the name and description of the session.
• Delete
• Deletes the entire selected session data from the database.
• Delete Virtual User Logs
• Deletes only the VU log data for the selected sessions. 

The easiest solution to the ORA-01654 is to delete old session data as shown below:

On the other hand, if you are using Oracle EE^[2,3] and have enough disk space, all you need to do is:

Use ALTER TABLESPACE ADD DATAFILE statement to add one or more files to the tablespace indicated.

Note that if you are currently using XE, we would recommend you use a dedicated machine for database and use Oracle EE.

Attach to Session

Read [4] for how to set up autopilot.  After setting up the parameters of autopilot, you can run scenarios from the command line.^[4]  Assuming you have done that, then you can monitor load test session by attaching to it in OLT.  This enables a tester to share real-time test results and to collaborate with team members during testing.

From menu Session, select Attach.... The current running session as below should be listed.

You can then select how you want to attach to the session:

• View Only
• Allows you access to graphs only
• Full Control
• Allows you to fully control tests

References

1. Oracle Load Testing
2. Understanding Oracle Features and Options
3. Oracle Database Software Downloads
4. OATS: How to Create a Scenario for Oracle Load Testing (Xml and More)
5. OATS: All Things about OLT Sessions (Xml and More)

How to Configure Scripts to use Databanks in OATS

This article is one of the Oracle Application Test Suite (OATS)^[1] series on Xml and More, which began with the following articles:

• Auto-Correlating Session IDs in Oracle Application Test Suite (OATS)
• Removing "Compatibility setting is not supported" Warning before You Do OpenScript Recording

In this article, we will show you:

• How to set up databanks in OpenScript^[4]
• How to configure scripts to use databanks

Databanks

Databanks are used to hold input data that can be automatically fed into your Web application during Load Testing^[5].  In this article, we have created a new script in OpenScript using ADF Load Test Module for the load testing of CRM FUSE (i.e., Fusion CRM with FUSE interface).

At the login step (i.e., step 2), we have used the following credentials:

• SALESREPUSER00001 /Welcome1

during script recording in OpenScript.  To do load testing, we need to use different users to drive our Web application .  In the following, we will show you how to achieve that.

Substitute Variables

After clicking the Post Data node, list of parameters used in HTTP Post is displayed.  As you can see that the value of userid was recorded as SALESREPUSER00001.  So, we need to configure it to use a databank.

After clicking on Edit..., it brings up the Parameter message box.  Let's click on the second Substitute button next to the Value field.

This brings up Substitue Variable window.  Next we need to add new databank before we can use it for variable substitution.

Note that before we started OpenScript, we have copied an existing databank named UserName.csv in the the subfolder of our workspace (i.e., FUSE_Saleopty_oct07_wrk).  Therefore, you have seen it appearing in the right panel.  For our script, we have chosen to store our databank "Relative to current script".

If you open the databank, you can see different user names are stored in it.  Note that all users will use the same password in our case.

After adding new databank, the value of userid has been updated to:

Finishing variable substitution, a new node (i.e., GetNextDatabankRecord) was shown next to "Run" node.

You can click on the new node to edit it.  But, the default (i..e, Next Record) works for us.

After we have configured our script to use databank, we can test it using "Iterate" playback.

Clicking on the Iterate button, this allows you to specify how many iterations you want to test.  In the following example, we have set it to be three times.

Next Steps

After testing our script running OK in the OpenScript (which runs on Windows only), we proceed with the following steps:

• Export script to a ZIP archive (i.e., FUSE_Saleopty_oct08_wrk.zip)
• Copy the ZIP archive file to the Oracle Load Testing (OLT) server (which runs on Linux)
• In OLT, we have imported the OpenScript ZIP to a scenario.
• After setting up Autopilot, we have run load testings using the databank to feed CRM FUSE with different users.

A new article describing the above steps will be posted in the future given time permitted.

References

1. Oracle Application Testing Suite
2. Auto-Correlating Session IDs in Oracle Application Test Suite (OATS) (Xml and More)
3. Removing "Compatibility setting is not supported" Warning before You Do OpenScript Recording
4. OpenScript for Load Testing Script Troubleshooting (Tutorial)
• OpenScript is a scripting platform for creating automated test scripts in Java.
• Version: 12.3.0.1 Build 376 was used in this discussion.
5. Oracle Load Testing
6. Oracle Application Testing Suite Downloads
7. OATS: Tie All Processes Together — from OpenScript to Scenario (Xml and More)