Database performance is crucial for many applications, but it is often daunting for us developers. When we delve into the topic, we are often confronted with blogs and articles about indexes, partitions, sharding, and cache configurations, which are highly database-centric. However, what is a good starting point if we realize that our application is too slow? And how do we even identify that our application is slow?

In this session, we will explore how to consistently optimize our application for database performance. We will start by discussing several methods to configure proper monitoring, address issues related to testing database performance on our development systems, and derive patterns and good practices for enhancing database performance from real situations in software projects, both big and small.