Performance Improvement

Fellow netters: We are currently engaged in an attempt to improve performance on some of our database servers. Here are a few questions we have. Any responses would be appreciated. 1) Does anyone know where we might find / purchase software which would help us in doing benchmarking on a dedicated machine? We'd like to find software which would impose a configuragle amount of i/o and a configuragle amount of cpu usage, and a configurable amount of ... on a dedicated database engine on a dedicated machine. We would use such a program in conjunction with sun net manager to gather statistics on how different hardware / software configurations behave under \\ different scenario simulations. Suggestions of vendors and / or shareware / freeware would be appreciated. 2) We once had a copy of a program called TPC. This purported to emulate a high transaction environment. Unfortunately, it was on a test machine and someone deleted it. Does anyone know where we can get another copy of this software? 3) Can anyone make any suggestions about how we can specify hardware based on our load...cpu usage...number of reads/writes at the database level? We'd like to recommend the purchase of hardware to management here based on the amount of processing we are currently doing plus the amount of processing we anticipate, but don't know how to formulate the recommendations. If you know of formulas / books / consultants that might help us, we'd appreciate suggestions. Tim Helton timh@amgen.com Amgen doesn't believe a word I say, maybe they know something you don't?