From the rise of vector databases to SQL:2023 to MariaDB troubles and the FAA outage, 2023 was an exciting year in database history.

This guide shows you how to use GitHub Actions to stop Terraform from overwriting your OtterTune-powered knob recommendations.

Since releasing the much-anticipated OtterTune v2.0 in April of this year, we’ve been working hard to further enhance our core feature functionality and polish existing workflows while delivering some exciting new features.

Query performance often varies depending on how you write queries. For PostgreSQL, what provides better performance? The IN or OR operator?

While we dislike PostgreSQL's multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), there are ways to address version copying, table bloat, index maintenance and vacuum management.

As much as we love PostgreSQL at OtterTune, its multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) is a big pain. We go over why.

We provide the same AI-powered automated knob tuning but now expand our recommendations to indexes and cloud settings.

On 1/11/23, all flights in the US were grounded because of a FAA NOTAM system outage tied to a corrupt database file. Here's why that wouldn't happen if the FAA was using Amazon RDS.

Another year has gone by, and I’m still alive. As such, it is an excellent time to reflect on what happened in the world of databases last year.

What's new in OtterTune v1.5? User approval of configuration changes; health checks for indexes, configuration, database tables, and autovacuum; and new performance insights.

Postgres is moving on up! But why? In this blog post, we pull together some of the most important reasons.

We’re excited to announce that we have completed our first SOC 2 Type II audit process with zero exceptions.

Cloud spending is projected to flatten or be reduced. As budgets tighten, what can you do to control costs?

From PostgreSQL autovacuum monitoring to database health check improvements, our interns produced great work in 2022.

You've got a slow-running PostgreSQL query, so you run ANALYZE, but what if ANALYZE can't fix it?

We’re pleased to announce OtterTune’s new health checks for database tables and indexes. This product update also includes new ways to interact with and collaborate with your team.

OtterTune’s new Table Health Checks automatically examine vital statistics and health checks to diagnose and resolve common database problems within tables.

With OtterTune's Database Quick Enable feature, you get a dashboard that makes OtterTune setup easier by automatically pulling your Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora database fleet information using the AWS IAM role you provide to OtterTune.

The start-up game is rough. We thought it would be helpful to others if we reflected on OtterTune’s journey from an academic research project to a thriving start-up.

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: one of the first things you should do, if not the first, when trying to solve a slow-running PostgreSQL query problem is run ANALYZE

The OtterTune agent is an open-source Python program that collects monitoring data from your database. We support installation via CloudFormation, Dock, Kubernetes Manifest and Helm Chart.

Our Database Health Checks automatically detect and inform you of possible issues in your database in real-time and provide recommendations to fix what’s going on

We introduced new features to make sure your database is running correctly and provide insights about how applications are using them. We also added the ability for you to have more control over its configuration tuning process, and make it easier to integrate OtterTune in your production environment.

At OtterTune, we take the database hustle seriously. In memory of Biggie, we present our 10 street rules for databases.

For Societe Generale (SG), a large French bank, we deployed a custom version of OtterTune for Oracle and saw 45% improvement vs. DBA-selected knobs.

This short video goes over how to activate human-in-the-loop controls, how to review recommendations, applying and skipping recommendations and controlling acceptable value ranges for configuration knobs.

OtterTune optimizes each of 100+ PostgreSQL configuration settings to support the database’s specific workload. This list goes over all the knobs OtterTune tunes.

OtterTune optimizes each of 150+ MySQL configuration settings to support the database’s specific workload. This list goes over all the knobs OtterTune tunes.

It was a wild year for the database industry, with newcomers overtaking the old guard, vendors fighting over benchmark numbers, and eye-popping funding rounds. It’s worth reflecting and taking stock as we move into 2022

Automated database optimization is great, but we realize many want to review recommendations. Ask and you shall receive! Our human-in-the-loop feature gives you more control.

Throughput is generally not a good target objective for applications that have daily workload patterns because it varies with the time of day. It’s dependent on the application wheras query latency is less dependent on the application and does not strongly vary with demand.

At $47,500 per CPU core, Oracle is pricey proposition against Postgres (which is effectively $0). OtterTune can help those looking to make the Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration.

From database checkup tools to detecting workload and other fluctuations to maximize tuning success, our interns produced such fantastic work that they're now full-time employees.

The OtterTune Agent only pushes metrics and knob settings information out; it does not accept data in. It also does not look at any sensitive user data or queries.

Whether you use OtterTune, or you tune by hand, these tips are helpful when it comes to the dreaded database restart.

Our primary focus since the first release of OtterTune has been to make it easier to get started with OtterTune and put it to work auto-tuning your databases. Here’s what’s new in this latest update.

We have met AWS users spending hundreds of thousands per month on database services, some of which are spending up to 40% of their monthly AWS bill on databases. And a large portion of this database revenue comes from people overpaying for their unoptimized RDS instances

Amazon’s default settings use general-purpose values for the most common workloads. They are not particularly bad for any application’s workload. But of course, this means that they are also not optimal for your database’s specific workload.

Autonomous database tuning is a growing trend that database developers and administrators should be tracking.

In the last 20 years, MySQL and PostgreSQL have increased the number of knobs that they expose to tune by 7x and 5x, respectively. What are the pros and cons of tuning those knobs externally vs. internally?

Autonomous database operation and tuning, driven by machine learning (ML), is becoming more prevalent. In this VLDB talk, I presented learnings that help DBMS users better understand how to benefit from ML more productively and safely.

The OtterTune team will be participating in full force at VLDB 2021 with a research paper presentation, workshop keynote, award talk, and discussion panel.

OtterTune started out in the academic world. We learned a lot to improve the product from our first real-world deployments.

OtterTune's roots go back to 2014. We've run over 100,000 trials to build our training corpus and even challenged conference attendees to try and best OtterTune.

OtterTune's algorithms make decisions based on training data, and sometimes these decisions can be unpredictable because the algorithms do not interpret the world the same way humans do. OtterTune has safeguards in place to protect your database.

For Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, which runs better? Amazon's default settings, PGTune or OtterTune? The performance results and cost savings may surprise you.

Give us five minutes and we'll show you how OtterTune optimizes databases.

We’re happy to announce the first commercial release of OtterTune software-as-a-service (SaaS) and seed funding From Accel. Our mission is to make databases run better, with less effort, and at a lower cost.