Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Administrator's Companion

Benchmarking and Load Testing

One way to help plan your system and to validate changes to your system is done via benchmarking and load testing. Benchmarking and load testing are similar in nature and just slightly different in usage. A benchmark is a performance test used to compare the performance of different hardware or software. A benchmark can be an industry standard test or a custom test used to measure a particular configuration or program. There are many companies that publicly publish benchmarks results. These results can be used to compare systems and are usually used by the publishing companies as marketing material. There are several organizations that are used to develop and facilitate standardized benchmarks. One of the best known ...