How do you stress load dev database (server) locally?

Question

Wow, this title gave me immediately "The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed."

Anyway, after some searching and reading, I decided to ask it.

Coming from my question: What are the first issues to check while optimizing an existing database?, which boiled down to necessity to stress load a local SQL Server dev database received as backup .bak file.

Did I understand correctly the answer by paxdiablo to question: "DB (SQL) automated stress/load tools?" that there is no general purpose stress loading testing SQL tools independent on RDBMS?

What are the stress test load-ing tools for SQL Server?
What are you doing for cheap and dirty stress loading of local dev SQL Server database?

Update: And I am interested in stress loading SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008 databases (having no clue about 2000).
OK, let's put aside final/real test (to QA speacialists, DBA and sysadmins) and confine the question in context of stress loading to find obvious (outrageous) flaws in design, performance bottlenecks.

Answer 1

As one word of warning: It is easy to stress test alocal db to see whether the db design is good / bad / missing (bad indices etc.)

Trying to get real time perforamnce metrics out of that is futile - even with plenty of memory (unlikely - most workstations are crappy memory wise compared to real db servers) your disc subsystem will SUCK (in 100 meter high letters) comapred to what a real db server can throw at it. Becasue normal dev local databases only have one or maybe two discs, while db servers often utilize a LOT more and a LOT faster discs. As such, waht may be SLOOOOW on your workstation may be a seconds operation on the sever.

But again, thigns like bad index usage is visible.

Answer 2

You are correct.

There are no general purpose stress loading testing SQL tools independent of RDBMS.

And how could there be? You can throughput benchmark the hardware sub-systems in isolation (such as SAN, network), but the performance of your database depends very much on your access patterns of your application(s), the type of RDBMS, the hardware.

Your best bet is to load test your application connected to your database on a representative hardware platform. There are several tools that can do, including the Ultimate version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.