Intelligence runs in the family
In 1939, a Cambridge mathematician named Gordon Welchman arrived at Bletchley Park and was given what seemed like a narrow task: study the call signs and message headers on intercepted German radio traffic. He was supposed to be doing housekeeping. Instead, he noticed something that would reshape the entire intelligence operation.
The patterns in the traffic — who was talking to whom, how often, at what times, from which locations — were telling a story all by themselves. You didn't need to break a single cipher to know that a Panzer division had moved, or that a new command structure had been activated, or that something significant was about to happen on the Eastern Front. The metadata was the intelligence.
Welchman ran Hut Six, the section responsible for breaking German Army and Air Force Enigma. But his real contribution was recognising that codebreaking and pattern analysis were two halves of the same discipline. In 1942, he fused them into a single operational unit: SIXTA.
SIXTA's Fusion Room — where traffic analysis intelligence was combined with Enigma decrypts in real time — became the model for how signals intelligence would work for the rest of the war and beyond. The analysts used hand-drawn network diagrams called Morrison Walls to map enemy communications structures, tracking which units were active, where they were, and how they connected. It was, in essence, the first network observability platform.
Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire, was home to the Government Code and Cypher School during the war. At its peak, over 10,000 people worked there in an operation whose existence remained secret for decades after the war ended. The work done there is estimated to have shortened the conflict by two to four years.
Gordon Welchman establishes Hut Six
Welchman takes charge of breaking German Army and Air Force Enigma. He invents the Diagonal Board — an addition to Turing's Bombe machine that transforms its effectiveness, turning days of work into hours. But his deeper insight is that traffic analysis should be integrated with cryptanalysis, not separated from it.
Alan Turing and Hut Eight crack Naval Enigma
Turing's team breaks the most difficult Enigma variant — the one protecting U-boat communications in the Atlantic. Allied convoys can now route around wolf packs. The tide of the Battle of the Atlantic begins to turn.
SIXTA becomes operational
Welchman's fusion of Hut Six cryptanalysis and Traffic Analysis is formalised as an operational unit. SIXTA moves from Beaumanor to Bletchley Park, initially housed in Huts 15A–15D. The Fusion Room begins combining traffic analysis with Enigma decrypts to produce the clearest possible intelligence picture.
Bill Tutte reverse-engineers the Lorenz cipher
Working from intercepted teleprinter traffic alone — without ever seeing the machine — Tutte deduces the complete logical structure of the Lorenz SZ40/42 cipher system. It is later described as one of the greatest intellectual feats of the war.
Tommy Flowers builds Colossus
A Post Office research engineer designs and builds the world's first programmable electronic computer to break the Lorenz cipher. Colossus goes into service on 1 June 1944 — just in time to confirm, via a decrypt of a message from Hitler himself, that no additional troops would be moved to Normandy. Eisenhower gives the order. D-Day proceeds.
SIXTA moves to Block G
As the operation scales, SIXTA relocates to permanent quarters. By war's end, Hut Six and SIXTA together are attacking over 20 Enigma keys daily and producing thousands of decrypts — intelligence that shapes every major Allied decision in the European theatre.
Intercepted radio traffic
The original SIXTA studied volumes, frequencies, call signs, and network structures in encrypted military communications. By understanding the patterns, they knew which messages to prioritise and which networks to target — often before a single cipher was broken. Morrison Walls mapped enemy command structures from metadata alone.
Database telemetry
Our SIXTA studies query patterns, wait events, connection behaviour, and system metrics across your database infrastructure. By learning what normal looks like, it identifies which anomalies matter and traces them to root cause — often before an alert fires. The topology of your data systems tells a story, if you know how to read it.
The original SIXTA proved that fusing pattern recognition with deep analysis could change the course of a war. We believe the same fusion — applied to database telemetry instead of intercepted radio traffic — can change the way teams operate their most critical infrastructure.
In April 2026, the SIXTA team will visit Bletchley Park — to walk the grounds where the original unit operated, to see the huts where Welchman and his team worked, and to stand in the rooms where pattern recognition and analysis were first fused into a single discipline.
Photos from our visit will appear here. In the meantime, Bletchley Park is open to the public and very much worth the trip. It is, among other things, a reminder that the most important breakthroughs are often organisational rather than technical — and that the right team, given the right problem, can achieve extraordinary things.
Meet the team building SIXTA
Same obsession with databases. Same belief that reliability engineering deserves better tooling.
About the Team