Introducing the new SAP HANA capture and replay tool, available with SAP HANA SPS12

Testing challenges

Testing application workload can be a huge effort for users, developers and consultants alike. Also, things do not get easier on a large scale, especially for moving from one revision or SPS of SAP HANA to another.

The common approach to this is using customized scripts for database access or executing test scenarios in client applications. Of course, developing such scenarios and test cases is a large and therefore very costly development effort – all of it just to ensure the solution still works correctly with the new SAP HANA software.

For regression testing a new SAP HANA SPS across a whole system landscape with multiple application stacks the complexity increases even more since now the interoperation between SAP HANA and the various client applications or reporting tools needs to be tested. The outcome of all this effort are hand-crafted tests that may only resemble the actual workload to a certain degree.

Capturing and Replaying Workloads - by the SAP HANA Academy

Introduction

One of the new SPS 12 features for monitoring and managing performance in SAP HANA is the ability to capture and replay workloads. This feature enables you to take a performance snapshot of your current system -- a captured workload -- and then execute the same workload again on the system (or another system from backup) after some major hardware or software configuration change has been made. This will help you evaluate potential impacts on performance or stability after, for example, a revision upgrade, parameter modifications, table partition or index changes, or even whole landscape reorganisations.

In this blog, I will describe the required preparation and the operational procedures.