How do I properly test my database performance with high load demand?

Question

I have found a lot of topics about stress-testing web application.

My goals are different, it's to test only database (sybase sql anywhere 9).

What I need:

• Some tool to give a diagnostic of all sqls and find a bottleneck. I wish I could macro-view the entire system easily.
• Best practices to design/build a good sql queries.

The system issues are:

• 20GB database size.
• 2-5 request per second
• Thousands sql spread in the code (this messy can be solved only rewriting the system).

Answer 1

several open source tools are listed here:

http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

Answer 2

The quickest way would actually be to upgrade your SQL Anywhere to v10 or (better) v11, as the latest releases include a complete performance diagnostic toolset. See the documentation here for more details.