SPARC T4-2 Produces World Record Oracle Essbase Aggregate Storage Benchmark Result
- by Brian
Significance of Results 
  
Oracle's SPARC T4-2 server configured with a
Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array 
and running Oracle Solaris 10 with
Oracle Database 11g 
has achieved exceptional performance
for the Oracle Essbase Aggregate Storage Option 
benchmark. The benchmark has 
upwards of 1 billion records, 15 dimensions and millions of members.
Oracle Essbase is a multi-dimensional online analytical processing 
(OLAP) server and is well-suited to work well with SPARC T4 servers.
 
   
    
      
The SPARC T4-2 server (2 cpus) running Oracle Essbase 11.1.2.2.100
outperformed the previous published results on 
Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M5000 server (4 cpus)
with Oracle Essbase 11.1.1.3 on Oracle Solaris 10 
by 80%, 32% and 2x performance improvement on Data Loading,
Default Aggregation and Usage Based Aggregation, respectively.
     
    
      
The SPARC T4-2 server with Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and
Oracle Essbase running on Oracle Solaris 10 achieves
sub-second query response times for 20,000 users in a 15 dimension
database.
     
    
      
The SPARC T4-2 server configured with 
Oracle Essbase was able to aggregate and store values in the database
for a 15 dimension cube in 398 minutes with 16 threads and in 
484 minutes with 8 threads.
     
    
      
The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array provides more than a 20% improvement
out-of-the-box compared to a mid-size fiber channel disk array for
default aggregation and user-based aggregation.
     
    
      
The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array with Oracle Essbase provides
the best combination for large Oracle Essbase databases leveraging 
Oracle Solaris ZFS and
taking advantage of high bandwidth for faster load and aggregation.
     
    
      
Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a family of complete, integrated, hot
pluggable and best-of-breed products known for enabling enterprise
customers to create and run agile and intelligent business
applications. Oracle Essbase's performance demonstrates why so many
customers rely on Oracle Fusion Middleware as their foundation for
innovation.
     
   
  Performance Landscape 
   
    
       
        System 
        Data Size(millions of items) 
        Database Load(minutes) 
        Default Aggregation(minutes) 
        Usage Based Aggregation(minutes) 
       
       
        SPARC T4-2, 2 x SPARC T4 2.85 GHz  
        1000 
        149 
        398* 
        55 
       
       
        Sun M5000, 4 x SPARC64 VII 2.53 GHz 
        1000 
        269 
        526 
        115 
       
       
        Sun M5000, 4 x SPARC64 VII 2.4 GHz 
        400 
        120 
        448 
        18 
       
    
    
    
* –
398 mins with CALCPARALLEL set to 16;
484 mins with CALCPARALLEL threads set to 8
  
  Configuration Summary  
  
 Hardware Configuration:
 
  
1 x SPARC T4-2
    
2 x 2.85 GHz SPARC T4 processors
128 GB memory 
2 x 300 GB 10000 RPM SAS internal disks  
   
  
Storage Configuration:
 
  
1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array 
    
40 x 24 GB flash modules
SAS HBA with 2 SAS channels
Data Storage Scheme Striped - RAID 0
Oracle Solaris ZFS  
   
  
Software Configuration:
 
  
Oracle Solaris 10 8/11
Installer V 11.1.2.2.100
Oracle Essbase Client v 11.1.2.2.100
Oracle Essbase v 11.1.2.2.100
Oracle Essbase Administration services 64-bit
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.3)
HP's Mercury Interactive QuickTest Professional 9.5.0 
 
  Benchmark Description 
  
The objective of the Oracle Essbase Aggregate Storage Option
benchmark is to showcase the ability of Oracle
Essbase to scale in terms of user population and data volume for large
enterprise deployments. Typical administrative and end-user operations
for OLAP applications were simulated 
to produce benchmark results.
 
  
The benchmark test results include:
   
    
Database Load: Time 
elapsed to build a database including outline and data load.
 
    
Default Aggregation: Time elapsed to build aggregation.
 
    
User Based Aggregation: Time elapsed of the aggregate views
proposed as a result of tracked retrieval queries.
 
   
  
Summary of the data used for this benchmark:
   
    
40 flat files, each of size 1.2 GB, 49.4 GB in total
 
    
10 million rows per file, 1 billion rows total
 
    
28 columns of data per row
 
    
Database outline has 15 dimensions 
(five of them are attribute dimensions)
 
    
Customer dimension has 13.3 million members
 
    
3 rule files 
 
   
  Key Points and Best Practices 
   
    
      
The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array has been used to 
accelerate the application performance.
     
    
      
Setting data load threads (DLTHREADSPREPARE) 
to 64 and Load Buffer to 
6 improved dataloading by about 9%.
     
    
      
Factors influencing aggregation materialization performance 
are "Aggregate Storage Cache" and "Number of Threads" (CALCPARALLEL) 
for parallel view materialization. The optimal values for this workload 
on the SPARC T4-2 server were:
      
Aggregate Storage Cache: 32 GB 
CALCPARALLEL: 16
 
       
     
   
  See Also 
   
    
Oracle Essbase Aggregate Storage Option Benchmark on 
Oracle's SPARC T4-2 Server   
oracle.com    
    
Oracle Essbase  
oracle.com 
OTN   
     SPARC T4-2 Server  
oracle.com 
OTN   
    
Oracle Solaris   
oracle.com 
OTN   
    
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition   
oracle.com 
OTN   
   
  Disclosure Statement 
  
 Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names
 may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 28 August 2012.