Performance Without Magic: How Open Source Databases Scale
Presented by:
Charly Batista
Charly is passionate about databases and performance. He has been working with databases and development for over 20 years and has participated in many projects, from the design of a small sensor to count how many times a ball passes through a basketball hoop to complex database proxy applications.
Outside work, he loves sports, as a good Brazilian he practices football (or soccer), volleyball, and surprisingly ping-pong. Charly is also passionate about new cultures, their languages, and traditions, and has lived and/or worked in a few different countries. Today he basically lives between Brazil and China. Not really in between, but stays some time in Brazil and some time in China :D
No video of the event yet, sorry!
Let's be honest, database performance often feels like dark magic. One day your queries fly, the next they crawl, and you're left wondering what changed. The common pieces of advice are usually "tune your queries", "tune the parameters", but what does that really mean? This talk strips away the mystery of high-performance database tuning, focusing on practical, open-source techniques applicable to PostgreSQL, MySQL, and their variants.
We’ll explore how the core concepts of indexing, memory management, and I/O interact to determine your system’s throughput. We will demystify common optimization myths and show how effective scaling is about understanding the database engine's relationship with the underlying operating system and hardware. This isn't just theory: we'll dive into real-world tuning parameters (like shared_buffers, innodb_buffer_pool_size, and kernel settings) and provide clear, actionable rules for when software tuning hits its limit and when you must invest in faster hardware, and critically, which hardware matters most (spoiler: it's not always the CPU or Memory).
If you want to move beyond guessing and start scaling with precision, this session will give you the practical knowledge to do it. No vendor promises, no marketing fluff, just the stuff that actually moves the needle when your users are waiting!
- Date:
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Dev
- Difficulty:
- Medium