At a recent SRE Meetup in Bangalore, we had the pleasure of meeting Akshay Deshpande. During our conversation, Akshay, who manages a Performance/Observability Engineering team at Smarsh discussed his passion for observability and his constant drive to improve the field. Smarsh helps companies gain valuable insights from their communication data, enabling them to proactively identify potential regulatory and reputational risks before they escalate.

Traditional database design prioritizes data integrity through normalization. However, for read-heavy workloads, normalized data structures can lead to complex queries and slower performance. Denormalization offers an alternative approach to optimize query execution and improve efficiency. A study concluded that denormalization can improve query performance when implemented with a thorough understanding of application requirements.