Stress testing of SAS libraries using JMETER

[gyan39]

Hi All,

I am working on a Oracle data warehouse project. We have a data model in Oracle which users will be accessing via a SAS library from SAS EG. I want to run an automated performance test on SAS Library. I have already used parallel option in SAS EG to execute multiple queries simultaneously but that is not helping us as we need multiple users to run multiple session of SAS EG sessions.  I have following queries related to this:

1. Is there any SAS tool that can help to perform automated performance test on SAS Libraries?

2. How I can use Apache JMETER to perform automated performance test on SAS Libraries?

Thanks and Regards

Gyan

[SASKiwi]

Not sure why you need to stress test SAS libraries that are pulling data from Oracle. Have you done any testing so far with just single queries? If not you should start with these and compare performance with other SQL query tools like Oracle's SQL*Plus. If run times are similar then you can be fairly certain SAS queries are working efficiently.

LIBNAME query performance will be primarily influenced by two things: Oracle server performance and the performance of the network pipe between Oracle and SAS servers. In my experience the performance of SAS itself is not a major factor. The main limit is often network performance, particularly when extracting large data volumes. For example if your Oracle and SAS servers are not in the same data centre and you are pulling data over long distances this can really slow down performance.

Once you've confirmed single queries are working efficiently, then I'd suggest you set them up as SAS batch jobs. As long as you pre-assign your SAS Oracle LIBNAMES (I'm assuming here you have defined them in SAS metadata) then they will work fine in batch. It is very easy to run multiple SAS batch jobs simultaneously and this will mimic the performance of multiple simultaneous EG sessions running the same queries, plus they are a lot easier to set up.  

[gyan39]

Thanks @SASKiwi for the suggestion.

We have already done performance testing with some queries using SAS EG parallel sessions options. Since we have limited cirtix session connections per users so one user can not open multiple EG sessions to initiate multiple queries.

Yes, our libraries are defined in metadata and we can also use them to test in batch mode by scheduling those queries. Initially, we have thought about it but we wanted to use some testing tools so that we can develop some knowledge and use the tool in future for all releases. We found JMETER is free and popular.

May be for current scenario we can use the batch mode.

Thanks and Regards

Gyan