If you have to work on UNIT test (or single developer test) there are a lot of tools but if you are talking about SIZING, TUNING and so on you cannot reach your goals without using complex tools and working with more RDBMS. In the last 4 years I worked and designed testing processes on J2EE and without "high levels" tool we cannot understand when the probs are on the java code, on IO SW&HW subsystems, RDBMS or concurrency on classes or table rows. You have to develop testing code for specific goals. We spend less time using commercial tools (like BMC, Quest and Mercury for J2EE and web users simulation), we develop the 4th generation of our test processes and the last 2 times, using the commercial tools, we take half time on update processes and testing times.