Benchmarking is hard. There are many ways to do it wrong and few to do it right.

But zooming out from any single system or harness, there are broad principles that should be applied to all benchmarking. Using these correctly makes it difficult to produce biased results.

Am I the world's best benchmarker? Certainly not. I invented the language balls, after all. But correctness and precision are important parts of PlanetScale's culture. We've spent considerable time learning the art of benchmarking, and are here to share best-practices.

Here, we're focusing primarily on benchmarking databases, but these principles apply to many domains.