Did that say free? Why yes, yes it did! But don’t let the price tag fool ya, these are some pretty nice little utilities. Another blog post inspired by a question on Twitter.
I went to SQL Saturday #383 a few weeks ago and noticed a handful of performance testing utilities being mentioned or used during many of the presentations. I have seen them all mentioned or used in demos before, but I have very little experience using them myself. I thought it would be nice to gather them all in one place for future reference, and I can definitely foresee a more in depth review of each down the road.
Below you will find the name of the utility, a brief description of what it is primarily used for (taken from the creator’s website), and the URL of the creator’s website.
Warning: These utilities are made to put a significant load on your database server so use at your own risk. Make sure your resume is up to date if you choose to run them in production!
In all seriousness, understand what these tools do before you attempt to run them in any of your environments. If you run these utilities against a server that uses a shared resource like a SAN, they can affect other hosts using that SAN. If you run them against a VM, they can impact othere guests on the same host. This advice really goes for any tool you might use, but a couple of these have the ability to significantly impact performance on a live system.
Website: SQLIO Download
Website: DiskSpd on Github
Website: http://linux.dell.com/dvdstore/
Website: http://www.hammerdb.com/
Website: http://www.datamanipulation.net/sqlquerystress/
There you have it, a list of some really neat performance test utilities for your SQL Servers. Stay tuned for a deeper dive into each of them over the next few months.