How to Create Indexes Or Manage Performance For Complex Queries Before a Release?
It's always a tough thing to performance test production systems, companies typically have far lesser systems/hardware for QA/Staging/Dev environments. One method I use is to baseline performance of our QA system before implementing SQL changes, and then check performance after. I am not concerned with the actual times, but the delta of before and after. Unless you have exact hardware/systems between environments, you will be somewhat limited.