Gianluca Sartori continues a series on WorkloadTools:
Last week I showed you how to use WorkloadTools to analyze a workload. As you have seen, using SqlWorkload to extract performance data from your workload is extremely easy and it just takes a few keystrokes in your favorite text editor to craft the perfect .json configuration file.
Today I’m going to show you how to capture a workload and save it to a file. If you’ve ever tried to perform this task with any other traditional benchmarking tool, like RML Utilities or Distributed Replay, your palms are probably sweaty already, but fear not: no complicated traces to set up, no hypertrophic scripts to create extended events captures. WorkloadTools makes it as easy as it can get.
Saving a workload to a file might look superfluous when you think that WorkloadTools has the ability to perform replays in real-time (I’ll discuss this feature in a future post), but there are situations when you want to replay the same exact workload multiple times, maybe changing something in the target database between each benchmark to see precisely what performance looks like under different conditions.
Gianluca’s technique does seem a lot less fussy than the Microsoft techniques.