Related (and slightly related) Tips and Tricks Planned Outages disable paging during a known outage how to let all machines know? how will processes react? Restartable Processing stateful processes which log or processes which can do redundant work Replication and DNS easy switch to new master no performance impact but it *is* a manual process On-Line Backups use mysqlsnapshot (like mysqlhotcopy) locking can be a problem use slave instead of master decreased frequency when using replication connection pile-up problem