Sometimes, it's necessary to test durability and I/O operations against the database directly. How fast are insert, update, and select queries on the tables in question? For such tests, JMeter provides a JDBC Request sampler to help issue SQL queries against the database. However, to use it, we need to set up a JDBC Connection Configuration component. Setting up this component requires us to point to a database. Therefore, let's go ahead and set up the database. Normally, this will already be set up for you to test against, but for illustrative purposes, we are going to assume that none has been set up. We will be using H2, an open source, pure Java SQL database. It is lightweight and relatively easy to set up. You can find more details about H2 at http://www.h2database.com/html/main.html.