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copied!<p>We never really found an adequate solution for stress testing our mainframe DB2 database so we ended up rolling our own. It actually just consists of a bank of 30 PCs running Linux with DB2 Connect installed.</p> <p>29 of the boxes run a script which simply wait for a starter file to appear on an NFS mount then start executing fixed queries based on the data. The fact that these queries (and the data in the database) are fixed means we can easily compare against previous successful runs.</p> <p>The 30th box runs two scripts in succession (the second is the same as all the other boxes). The first empties then populates the database tables with our known data and then creates the starter file to allow all the other machines (and itself) to continue.</p> <p>This is all done with <code>bash</code> and DB2 Connect so is fairly easily maintainable (and free).</p> <p>We also have another variant to do random queries based on analysis of production information collected over many months. It's harder to check the output against a known successful baseline but, in that circumstance, we're only looking for functional and performance problems (so we check for errors and queries that take too long).</p> <p>We're currently examining whether we can consolidate all those physical servers into virtual machines, on both the mainframe running zLinux (which will use the shared-memory HyperSockets for TCP/IP, basically removing the network delays) and Intel platforms with VMWare, to free up some of that hardware.</p> <p>It's an option you should examine if you don't mind a little bit of work up front since it gives you a great deal of control down the track.</p>

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