The speaker addresses the gap between developers and database engineers, highlighting that developers often view databases as black boxes, only caring about query completion and correctness. However, from a business standpoint, user experience and performance are crucial. The speaker emphasizes the importance of looking at query response time in terms of percentiles and specific distributions, rather than just averages. They also discuss the need to measure response time for both normal and error queries separately. The speaker suggests using SQL Commenter as a project to pass metadata to SQL queries, allowing for better observability. They also mention the benefits of breaking down queries by user tenant, application, schema, table, database host, and web/application server, as well as the importance of considering performance impacts from background database activities. The speaker suggests improvements for MySQL, such as better support for prepared statements, grouping data by time, including a list of tables queried, and providing information about plan IDs and top-weight summaries. The talk concludes with an open Q&A session.