As part of my A call to arms! post about a month ago, I’ve had a number of unofficial comments of support. In addition, I’ve also been approached to assist in the completion of a MySQL Transactional support engine. More information on the PBXT engine will be forthcoming soon by it’s creator.

Anyway, I’ve taken on the responsiblity of assisting in testing this new storage engine. This will also give me the excuse of being able to pursue some other ideas about the performance of differing storage engines for differing tables in business circumstances, such as MyIsam verses InnoDB in a highly OLTP environment. Part of testing will be ensure ACID conformance in varying situations and multi-concurrency use. Of course the ability to also do performance and load testing would be a obvious extension.

Considering how I’m going to benchmark is an interesting approach. I of course want to use Java, my choice of language at present. This presents a problem, in another factor towards performance, however by using Java, I’m simulating a more real world environment of a programming overhead and JDBC Connector rather then just raw performance output.

Laying out a plan would include an ability to have an existing database structure and data, be able to bulk define SQL statements and transactions, and parameterise SQL during transactions. I would need to be able to verify the state of database from the transactions, and clearly identify any invalid data. I would also need the ability for handling threads, and of course adequate reporting of my results.

As of MySQL 5.1.4, there is a supported benchmarking tool called mysqlslap in MySQL. I’ve discounted using this because I figured at this early stage, the documentation and exposure of this is of course limiting, and I’m sure I’d still need to perform other development.

Along comes JMeter. Within Java development I use JUnit quite extensively. This is key in the test-driven agile methodology approach of Extreme Programming. In discussion with this problem with a collegue on a new project, I found that JMeter was used for extensive load testing for web applications, but also performed database testing, and provides the support to integrate JUnit tests.

So yesterday I had a quick look at JMeter. The capabilities for defining, reporting and threading are quite complete. It took litterally minutes to install, configure, run an initial test and view results all in a GUI interface. A little more work gave me scripting handling of my initial tests. I’ve posted my initial investigations of JMeter – Performance Testing Software and JMeter and Ant Integration earlier.

With this behind me, I’ve just got to define the approach for more complete transactional tests, explictly confirming the results (I’m hoping to achieve this in custom JUnit tests). If I can solve this, then I can spend the most of time in the defining of adequate tests. Let’s see what the next few days work provides.