Database-level settings

Database systems often have software-level optimizations that can be made. The choices you make with such settings can have a dramatic impact on overall database performance. Much like other optimizations these optimizations may have trade-offs to be made and so it is important to understand what those are and how they affect the system as a whole.

Most database systems have a default behavior that is considered to be good for most use-cases. However, depending on the way your workload accesses data, there may be a number of settings that can be changed to increase performance. These options will often trade memory for performance, or performance for guaranteed reliability; depending on the needs of your application you may choose one over the other. Settings such as query caching, indexing engines, maximum concurrent connections, data caching, and more will allow you to fine-tune your performance.