Are SELECT queries most companies' bottleneck? While we find the occasional SELECT without an index or joining something it doesn't need to, my biggest struggle is optimizing UPDATES.

In our busiest times we need to update up to 100,000 rows, ~50 columns, every ~5 seconds. So ideally the update finishes before the next one starts to avoid deadlocks.

MySQL probably isn't the most ideal DB for our use-case, but it's what the startup had been using for years before I joined.