The database administration team has asked you to help them improve the performance of their new database server running on Google Compute Engine. The database is for importing and normalizing their performance statistics and is built with MySQL running on Debian Linux. They have an n1-standard-8 virtual machine with 80 GB of SSD persistent disk. What should they change to get better performance from this system?

The correct answer is to dynamically resize the SSD persistent disk to 500 GB. For Google Compute Engine persistent disks, IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and throughput scale with disk size. A larger disk provides more IOPS and throughput, which is crucial for database performance, especially for I/O-intensive workloads like importing and normalizing data. Increasing the VM's memory might help if the database is memory-bound, but disk I/O is a more common bottleneck for this type of workload. Creating a new VM with PostgreSQL or migrating to BigQuery are significant architectural changes that don't address the immediate performance bottleneck of the existing MySQL instance. Modifying batch jobs for bulk inserts is a good practice but doesn't resolve underlying disk performance limitations.