Methodology

Before moving on to concrete examples, it is important to follow a methodology by which to perform the relevant tests. A critical thing when testing a database is to make sure that it is equivalent to production. Otherwise, make sure that:

• The difference between environments is acceptable
• The difference between environments is clearly identified
• The test remains meaningful and usable

By "equivalent to production," we mean two things:

• The configuration of the database engine must be identical to the production engine (if it exists).
• The volume of data in the database must also be as close as possible to that for the production database (the simplest way to do this is to have a backup of what is in production, or, if you start from scratch, to have an idea of the future volume).

For skeptics or those who are curious, we can see in the following graph the response time of the same SQL query executed on different volumes of data:

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