SQL Load Test 1.0

The SQL Load Test was designed to generate a Visual Studio 2005 Unit Test from a SQL Server Profiler trace. The tool extracts all the SQL statements and stored procedure calls from the trace and turns them into a single Visual Studio Unit Test, which can then be configured as a Visual Studio Load Test.
The tool does not interact with the database itself when it generates the test code and so it can be used "offline".
The generated code needs to be customised to include a connection string to the database under test. The generated code also includes hooks to allow the user to customise the parameters that are passed to the SQL statements and stored procedures, so that variability can be introduced into the data to prevent caching from giving artificially high performance figures.
The tool is intended to be used in conjunction with a client program that exercises the database. A trace of the clients SQL Server activity is captured using the SQL Server Profiler. This represents a test scenario, which is then processed by the tool to produce a Unit Test that replays the scenario.
The tool requires a trace to be collected using the SQL Server Profiler tool. The tool assumes that the trace only contains records pertaining to a single client session. So it is important to ensure that the trace is set up to only collect trace records generated by the activity of the client being used to generate the scenario.
It is therefore advisable to run the client on a machine from which no other activity on the SQL Server database is being generated, and to set the SQL Server Profiler filter accordingly.
System requirements:
- SQL Server 2005 SDK and the SQL Server 2005 Management Tools are installed.
Version restrictions:
- Only supports code that operates against a single database with a single connection.
- Prepared statements are not supported.
- The tool cannot (yet) configure and capture the trace for you, it requires you to use the SQL Profiler yourself to get a trace. With SQL 2005 it is possible to automate this.
- Not (yet) integrated into Visual Studio or the DB Pro edition.
- The tool has only been tested in an English environment, it is unlikely to work correctly in other environments, particularly with dates. In a future version this could be resolved by requiring the ExistingConnection event class, which lists language and date format.
- The tool does not support the XML data types.
- InputOutput parameters that are initialised with a NULL cannot be distinguished from Output-only parameters, so they are treated as Output only.
- When the trace passes a NULL to a binary parameter (e.g. image, binary, varbinary) the generated code will generate a runtime error. The generated code needs to be modified to pass SqlBinary.Null. The custom code generation extensibility point can be used to work around this.
- Positional parameters passed to SQL statements (as opposed to stored procedure calls) are not supported.