This may not be wise or applicable in your case, but here is what we did for a real time test. We wanted to assure ourselves that the live, production database was active and all connections to it were up, so we created the "A Test" or acceptance test. It ran from the client side systems and software, through all communications and then wrote rows in the database. We added a field that was a "test flag" to all rows, which is a minor amount of overhead. We could write a few rows, query them, check for turnaround time, then select and delete them by their "test flag" status.

Thus we could redo the test anytime and recover to a previous state. This is not good in all circumstances, but is very useful to assure the production database was up and in a good state.

Diskcrash