The database is the core of any system because it holds the data that drives your entire experience. We spend countless hours designing the data model, updating engine versions, and tuning performance. But how confident are you that you have configured it to be as performant as possible, given the dozens of parameters and how they interact with each other? Andy Pavlo researches autonomous database systems, and out of that research he created Ottertune to find the optimal set of parameters to use for your specific workload. In this episode he explains how the system works, the challenge of scaling it to work across different database engines, and his hopes for the future of database systems.