The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Models which are used in the software development process provide the control over the execution process and help to track the project progress. In this whole process, performance testing stage comes quite late and that is limited to the load testing where the system is tested against predefined number of concurrent users doing various transactions in the predefined pattern. This process gives the fair idea about the performance of the developed application but this is not adequate to test the impact of data volumes as test database is populated with the bare minimum data which is needed for the functional testing. The data retrieving from a table having 100 rows will be definitely faster than a table having 10 millions rows. Impact of volume of data is not getting considered in the performance testing process and this holds the developer/tester back from assuring the performance in the production environment. This is very critical issue as the information systems are becoming more and more complex and it is very common these days where database sizes are in hundreds of GBs. The tools available in the market and the existing methodologies are suitable for the production environment but not effective in the development environment. This creates a gap between database application development and its deployment in the production environment. Therefore assuring the performance against high volume is an indisputable problem faced by the application developer and tester. In this paper, we have discussed a tool ‘SQL-PASS’ (SQL Performance Assurance Services) based on database emulation technique and its integration with SDLC process which helps in validating and assuring the SQL performance at different stages of SDLC.

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Database Emulation SQL Performance Query Optimization Explain plan Database statistics Extrapolation of Database statistics query execution time forecasting