Benchmarking databases – and maintaining fairness and integrity while doing so – is a notoriously difficult task to get right, especially in the data streaming space. Vendors want their systems to produce mouth watering results, and so unnatural configurations divorced from customer realities (AKA “vanity” benchmarks) get tested, and it's ultimately the end-user that is left holding the bag when they realize that their actual TCO is a lot higher than they were led to believe.

Middleware is a cloud observability company that uses AI to help customers identify, understand, and fix issues across their infrastructure. It’s probably not a surprise to you that their entire business relies on scalable streaming infrastructure: they’re ingesting and processing tens of TiBs of telemetry every day, and need to process it very efficiently.