SLES includes an iSCSI initiator, linux-iscsi. The initiator is configured using a daemon that is managed just like any other service, with a script in /etc/init.d/ and configuration files in /etc. After installing linux-iscsi using YaST I edited /etc/iscsi.conf to set the DiscoveryAddress and ran ‘/etc/init.d/iscsi start’ to start the service (‘chkconfig iscsi on’ ensures it is restarted after a reboot also). Logging onto my NetApp filer I could see the SLES initiator also logged in (‘igroup show’), and was able to create and map a LUN to the host. Back on the host ‘iscsi-ls’ yielded nothing useful, so I downloaded and installed the linux host utilities from NetApp’s support site. ‘sanlun show all’ now shows the lun-pathname and local SCSI devicename (eg. /dev/sdx) to which it is mapped. Oracle’s Orion benchmark indicates a random I/O throughput dramatically better for the iSCSI LUN compared to using a VMware virtual disk.
Month: April 2010
Gosling Quits Oracle
Gosling blogged "As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good…" Ouch.
sqlunit & dbUnit
Now that I have my database schema creation and maintenance automated with Incanto and dbMaintain I have been looking at testing tools for stored procedures. Perhaps the best known for Oracle PL/SQL are Feuerstein’s utPLSQL and subsequent Quest Code Tester for Oracle. Other options include plunit, PLUTO and ruby-pl-spec. My main requirement, however, has been to invoke tests from an Ant project continuously integrated using Hudson and for now I have started using sqlunit, which is both mature and portable across different databases, as well as allowing relatively simple testcases to be specified in entirely XML.
My build-common.xml now contains
classname="net.sourceforge.sqlunit.ant.SqlunitTask"
classpathref="sqlunit-lib"/>
In addition to sqlunit I’ve found
dbUnit to be a useful tool for complex data setup prior to running a test.
Initilization of the dbUnit ant task is done as follows:
classname="org.dbunit.ant.DbUnitTask"
classpathref="dbunit-lib"/>