About

Database performance insights from the field

What is Rendiment?

Rendiment is a technical blog dedicated to database performance optimization, with a focus on MySQL and PostgreSQL. The name comes from the Catalan word for “performance” or “yield”—a fitting tribute to the pursuit of extracting maximum efficiency from database systems.

This blog exists to share practical, battle-tested knowledge from real-world database administration. Every post is grounded in actual production experience: debugging slow queries, optimizing schemas, managing high-traffic clusters, and navigating the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and performance.

What You’ll Find Here

Deep Technical Content

  • MySQL and PostgreSQL performance tuning
  • InnoDB internals and troubleshooting
  • Replication topologies (Galera, PXC, Group Replication)
  • Query optimization and execution plan analysis
  • Schema design and DDL safety

Tools and Techniques

  • Database monitoring (PMM, Coroot, Prometheus/Grafana)
  • Benchmarking methodologies (sysbench, ProxySQL testing)
  • Custom tooling (dbsafe for DDL analysis)
  • Performance profiling and FlameGraphs
  • Alerting strategies and dynamic thresholds

Real-World Scenarios

  • Production debugging war stories
  • Capacity planning for high-concurrency workloads
  • Zero-downtime schema migrations
  • Cluster failover testing
  • Search optimization with pg_trgm and pgvector

About the Author

Daniel Guzman Burgos is a database administrator and performance engineer based in Colombia. With years of experience managing production MySQL and PostgreSQL deployments, Daniel specializes in troubleshooting performance bottlenecks, designing resilient replication architectures, and building tools that make DBAs’ lives easier.

When not diving into InnoDB source code or profiling query execution, Daniel contributes to open-source database tools and shares knowledge with the DBA community.

Open Source Work:

  • dbsafe - Analyze MySQL ALTER TABLE statements before running them
  • Contributions to database monitoring and tooling projects

Why This Blog Exists

Too often, database performance advice is either too theoretical (academic papers that don’t translate to production) or too shallow (quick tips that don’t explain the “why”). Rendiment aims to bridge that gap.

Every post here is:

  • Practical - Tested in real environments, not just theory
  • Detailed - Explains the underlying mechanisms, not just commands to run
  • Honest - Includes failures and lessons learned, not just success stories

The goal is simple: help DBAs, developers, and infrastructure engineers make informed decisions about their databases.

Topics & Expertise

Databases:

  • MySQL (Percona Server, Oracle MySQL, MariaDB)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC)
  • MySQL Group Replication

Focus Areas:

  • Performance tuning and optimization
  • High availability and replication
  • Monitoring and observability
  • Schema design and migrations
  • Troubleshooting and debugging
  • Load testing and capacity planning

Technologies:

  • ProxySQL, HAProxy
  • PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management)
  • Grafana, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics
  • Coroot (eBPF-based monitoring)
  • Docker, Kubernetes operators

Get in Touch

Have questions about database performance? Want to discuss a specific optimization challenge? Reach out:

Comments are enabled on all blog posts via Giscus (GitHub Discussions). Feel free to ask questions, share your own experiences, or suggest topics for future posts.

Support This Work

All content on Rendiment is free and open. If you find these posts helpful, the best way to support this work is:

  • ⭐ Star dbsafe or other open-source projects
  • 🔗 Share posts with colleagues who might benefit
  • 💬 Comment with your own experiences and insights
  • 📧 Suggest topics you’d like to see covered

Latest posts are on the Blog page. For topic-specific content, browse by Categories or Tags.