This service is specifically helpful for customers with a mission-critical SQL Server on which they want to make a significant change. Such a change could set a high risk for application performance, and thus customers hesitate to implement. Some example scenarios are enabling newer compatibility mode on critical databases, reconfiguring cardinality estimator version, or migrating to a recent version of SQL Server. Also, this service is very successful when customers replace the hardware on which SQL Server was running and need complex data to understand the impact of such a change.
With load tests from Woodler, customers can better understand overall server and query performance behavior when a significant change occurs on their SQL Servers. It is achieved by replaying a workload collected from the production server in a sandboxed environment. After a series of replay rounds and application of planned configuration changes, we generate performance metadata of each executed test and compare the results in our PowerBI report.
The outcome of this service provides:
- Understanding how SQL server will handle the planned change
- How much the server CPU & IO resources will be affected
- How overall query performance will be affected by this change up to a specific query level
Based on analysis from this service, customers could perform query or index tuning on the database with implemented change and test the impact of such activities without affecting the existing production environment.
The output of this service is provided in the form of a PowerBI report with a two-hour presentation where we explain every recorded metric and result. In this way, customers can better understand the service outcome and decide if the planned change is safe or which kind of actions are needed to be successful in this change.
Power BI report contains several parts describing:
- Overall server performance characteristics during every load tests/server configuration settings
- Deep performance analysis of SQL Server thread wait statistics
- Analysis of impact on CPU resource
- Advanced analysis of SQL Server synchronization routines behavior
- IO Operational Statistics
- Analysis of query scaling during each load test
- The actual performance impact on every executed query from all load tests
Some examples from Power BI report:
