Chapter 2. Handling and Avoiding Downtime

In this chapter, we will learn how we should react when outages inevitably occur and how to prepare ourselves for them. We will cover the following recipes in this chapter:

• Determining acceptable losses
• Configuration – getting it right the first time
• Configuration – managing scary settings
• Identifying important tables
• Defusing cache poisoning
• Exploring the magic of virtual IPs
• Terminating rogue connections
• Reducing contention with concurrent indexes
• Managing system migrations
• Managing software upgrades
• Mitigating the impact of hardware failure
• Applying bonus kernel tweaks