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If you have performance problems in a production environment is it safe to run the test harness on live database?

The test harness simply snapshots the activity of the query you are testing, so it is only as invasive as the execution of the query plus the overhead to trace it.  So, it is "safe" to use in a production environment.  However, as the name implies, it is a *test* harness and intended to be used primarily in your test environment.  If used in production, it would likely be used only to capture the information for a single query execution that is problematic and then used again to capture the information for the query after it had been modified and placed back into production (to get a comparison of the before and after).  The true intent of the test harness is to be used in a test environment to capture and review multiple ways of solving a problem.  The comparison of all the alternatives will yield a "winner" and that winner is then what is chosen for migration into production.