Ilya Bakulin presents methods for benchmarking NoSQL database systems. He discusses the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) framework, which allows benchmarking of NoSQL databases using common workloads. YCSB issues simple operations like insert, update, delete and scan without using SQL. It has adapters for popular NoSQL systems and allows custom workloads and databases to be added. Bakulin demonstrates YCSB by benchmarking Cassandra and sharded MySQL under different read/write ratios. Cassandra performs better in a write-heavy workload while MySQL is better for reads.