Query performance coaching for mid-market engineering teams

The moment arrives when a developer ships a feature, the data grows past a few hundred gigabytes, and suddenly a query that took 200ms now takes 45 seconds — and nobody on the team knows exactly why or how to fix it without weeks of trial and error. The gap persists for a structural reason: database vendors have no incentive to make their query execution transparent enough that users can fix problems themselves, because slow queries often lead users to upgrade compute or storage tiers, which is where the vendor makes more money.

What teams actually need is something that reads their slow query logs, explains in plain English why a specific query is slow — missing index, bad join order, full table scan, cross-region read amplification — and then hands them a concrete rewrite or index suggestion they can test immediately. The complaints here are specific: users say they need 'in-depth knowledge of query writing skills' they don't have, that 'long queries are needed even for small amounts of data', and that they can't add indexes to system tables they don't control. Generic database monitoring tools show you that a query is slow; they don't show you why in terms a mid-level developer can act on without a DBA.

This is a recurring business, not a one-time audit, because slow queries are not a fixed problem — they re-emerge every time a new feature ships, every time data volume crosses a new threshold, and every time a schema changes. A team that fixes their top ten slow queries this month will have ten new ones in sixty days. The cost of not solving it is real: wasted compute spend on over-provisioned instances bought to compensate for bad queries, and engineering hours lost to guesswork.

What to build

Connect to a team's RDS or Aurora slow query log and query execution plans, automatically classify each slow query by root cause category (missing index, bad join strategy, full scan, cross-region hop), and generate a plain-English explanation plus a tested rewrite suggestion for each one — delivered as a weekly digest to the engineering lead.

Where to start

Start with teams that have already enabled the RDS Performance Insights feature but are frustrated that it shows them which queries are slow without telling them how to fix them — they've already opted in to observability, they just need the next step.

The hard part

Getting read access to slow query logs and execution plans requires either a direct database connection or AWS IAM permissions that security-conscious teams are reluctant to grant to a third party — the trust gap kills early sales before the value is even demonstrated.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per database instance monitored, with a free tier covering one instance and up to 50 slow queries analyzed per month — expansion happens naturally as teams add more instances or hit the analysis cap.