At GrafanaCon 2019 in Los Angeles, Peter Zaitsev, CEO of Percona, demonstrated how businesses can leverage Grafana and MySQL to create meaningful data visualizations that highlight important business metrics, such as sales per minute and revenue over 24 hours, utilizing existing client database information. Zaitsev emphasized the importance of visualizing data that is directly relevant to business goals, moving beyond standard performance metrics and addressing what truly impacts business outcomes. He also provided practical advice for optimizing MySQL setups, recommending the use of read-only users for safety, setting the max_execution_time variable to prevent long-running queries from overloading servers, and utilizing MySQL replicas for handling complex queries, ensuring efficient database performance during data visualization tasks.