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The Database Engineer's Production Playbook

Best practices for reliability, performance and safety: ten operational disciplines, twenty concepts to master and revisit, and a checklist for before you deploy.

By Mouad Krikbou · 18 October 2026 · 28 pages

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Contents

  1. 01One guide, many enginesp. 4
  2. 02Mindset and operating principlesp. 6
  3. 03Zero-downtime migrationsp. 7
  4. 04Locks, timeouts and long transactionsp. 9
  5. 05Backups, restores and recoveryp. 10
  6. 06Monitoring and observabilityp. 11
  7. 07Performance and capacityp. 12
  8. 08Security and least privilegep. 13
  9. 09High availability and failoverp. 14
  10. 10Data quality and migration safetyp. 16
  11. 11Operational hygienep. 17
  12. 12Runbooks and change managementp. 18
  13. 13How the principles work togetherp. 19
  14. 14Twenty concepts to master and revisitp. 21
  15. 15The pre-deploy checklistp. 25
  16. 16Referencesp. 27
The Database Engineer's Production Playbook · Solution Architect & Engineer