Database Replay enables you to capture a workload on the production system and replay it on a test system. This can be very useful when evaluating or adopting new database technologies because these changes can be tested on a test system without affecting the production system. However, if the new system being tested offers significantly better performance than the existing system, then Database Replay may not accurately predict how much additional workload can be handled by the new system.
For example, if you are consolidating multiple production systems into a single Oracle Exadata Machine, replaying a workload captured from one of the existing systems on Oracle Exadata Machine may result in much lower resource usage (such as host CPU and I/O) during replay because the new system is much more powerful. In this case, it is more useful to assess how the new system will handle the combined workloads from all existing systems, rather than that of a single workload from one system.
Consolidated Database Replay enables you to consolidate multiple workloads captured from one or multiple systems and replay them concurrently on a single test system. In this example, using Consolidated Database Replay will help you to assess how the database consolidation will affect the production system and if a single Oracle Exadata Machine can handle the combined workloads from the consolidated databases.
This chapter describes how to use Consolidated Database Replay and contains the following sections: