Technical documents

Detailed technical papers on how Sixta works, written for the engineers who will run it.

Database Observability vs Monitoring

March 19, 2026

Your database monitoring dashboard says everything is green. Your users are reporting errors. Both things are true at the same time, and the gap between them is where incidents live.

The Real Cost of Database Incidents

March 17, 2026

When a database goes down, the first question is always "how do we fix it?" The question that rarely gets asked until later, sometimes much later, is "what did that actually cost us?" The answer is usually worse than anyone expected.

MySQL Performance at Scale

March 12, 2026

MySQL still powers a large share of the world's production databases, particularly in e-commerce, SaaS, and applications built on the LAMP stack. But the performance challenges that emerge at scale are often different from what teams expect, and the tooling to diagnose them has improved significantly in recent years.

PostgreSQL Performance Tuning

March 10, 2026

PostgreSQL tuning advice tends to start and end with shared_buffers. That's table stakes. The real leverage for teams running PostgreSQL at scale is in vacuum tuning, query plan observability, and the performance improvements in PostgreSQL 17 that many teams haven't adopted yet.

How to Reduce Database MTTR

March 6, 2026

The average database incident takes 3 to 5 hours to resolve. Best-in-class teams consistently do it in under 60 minutes. The difference almost never comes down to technical skill. It comes down to whether the investigation workflow exists before the incident does.

What is a DBRE? The Database Reliability Engineering Role Explained

March 4, 2026

The term was coined in 2017. The role it describes emerged because the SRE revolution changed everything about how we run production systems, except databases. The Database Reliability Engineer exists to bring that same engineering discipline to the most critical layer of your stack.

Security Architecture Pack

March 1, 2026

The security and architecture documentation Sixta provides for review during procurement — how it connects, what it can and cannot reach, and how access is governed.