I will be working as QA on a projects which is upgrading Sybase ASE to version 16. I have not worked on RDBMS system upgrade projects before. I need assistance in drafting a Test strategy. Could anyone please provide me guidance on - What are the Steps involved in upgrading Sybase ASE version - From System test point of view what sorts of test should we be running (We are already running regression on the applications which are connected to the DBs but apart from that what else should we be validating?)
I believe you also need to be checking post-upgrade performance, i.e. run some set of load tests against per-upgrade configuration and re-run the same set after the upgrade to ensure that upgrade didn't cause performance degradation.
You can use i.e. Apache JMeter, it can execute arbitrary SQL queries in multithreaded manner via JTDS JDBC Driver. See The Real Secret to Building a Database Test Plan With JMeter article for details.