Always a fun time to bring up my favorite writeups in database benchmarking: https://questdb.com/blog/lies-damn-lies-and-database-benchma...

There’s also an excellent paper called “Fair Benchmarking Considered Difficult: Common Pitfalls In Database Performance Testing”.

Benchmarks are genuinely hard. Modern systems and hardware are notoriously complex and have different behaviors across runs and with minor tweaks to performance settings.

Yep, absolutely... and in the end benchmarks aren't going to sell a database anyways. Reliability and provable correctness and ease of integration are probably going to win in the end. It's a dubious marketing edge to lead with.

PostgreSQL itself is remarkably slow in many configurations and leaves a lot of performance on the table due to its architecture and assumptions. But it works and people trust it. So they use it.