This demonstration presents Oracle Database Replay, a novel approach to testing changes to the relational database management system component of an information system (software upgrades, hardware changes etc). Database Replay makes it possible to subject a test system to a real production workload, which helps identify all potential problems before implementing the planned changes on the production system. Any interesting workload period of a production database system can be captured with minimal overhead. The captured workload is used to drive a test system while maintaining the concurrency and load characteristics of the real production workload. The demonstration showcases how important maintaining the concurrency and load characteristics of the real workload is. The current testing solutions do not allow for synchronization based on data dependencies. Without proper synchronization the demonstration workload does not perform the work required and does not exercise the test system appropriately, leading to poor coverage and inadequate load. Thus many issues remain undetected. Database replay with its data based synchronization makes testing realistic and leads to the discovery of potential problems.

This paper presents Oracle Database Replay, a novel approach to testing changes to the relational database management system component of an information system (software upgrades, hardware changes etc). Database Replay makes it possible to subject a test system to a real production system workload, which helps identify all potential problems before implementing the planned changes on the production system. Any interesting workload period of a production database system can be captured with minimal overhead. The captured workload can be used to drive a test system while maintaining the concurrency and load characteristics of the real production workload. Therefore, the test results using database replay can provide very high assurance in determining the impact of changes to a production system before applying these changes. This paper presents the architecture of Database Replay as well as experimental results that demonstrate its usefulness as testing methodology.