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JMeter, SQL Server and Thread Safety.

It’s been a busy summer and I’ve missed making a lot of posts. This post is about an interesting event from June — interesting from a technical point of view, but also because it highlights a testing trap that I fall into repeatedly, which is reporting errors from tests that are slightly out of scale.

Using Apache JMeter for SQL Server concurrency testing.

I’ve used Apache JMeter in the past for stress testing J2EE web apps. Vendors don’t like me very much when I tell them we’re going to run a stress test on their apps. Oh, and if your network group is paranoid you may need to reassure them that you have mission-critical testing requirements before you start using JMeter. This time around I’m using it as a shell around a SQL script for calling a stored procedure that I strongly suspected of concurrency issues.

Continue reading “JMeter, SQL Server and Thread Safety.”

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Presentation: Three SQL Server Always Encrypted Findings.

On Friday I gave a presentation at the April meeting of the newly created Santa Fe SQL Server User Group santafesql.org.

I was a little nervous since I haven’t given a presentation since a DOE conference in Amarillo, TX in 1991. But in spite of my nerves, it went OK since it was a short 30-minute talk and since we had a great group of attendees. The group was patient with a couple technical difficulties and interacted well when I lost focus doing things like shifting back from slides to demos.

My three findings were amazement, horror, and satisfaction.

The first finding, amazement, was the subject of my last blog post. SQL Server’s ability to flawlessly upgrade an Always Encrypted database over an upgrade and a platform shift to Linux is amazing. I covered it more thoroughly in the blog post than I did in the presentation Taking SQL Server Always Encrypted on a road trip.

I had some pretty serious technical issues in my presentation.  Continue reading “Presentation: Three SQL Server Always Encrypted Findings.”