[rbanffy]

Politics is an unavoidable aspect of larger groups, but it gets a lot worse when coupled by wrong incentives that reward heroic disaster mitigation over active disaster avoidance.

When you design a system around a database, it pays off to design your ways of mitigating performance issues you might face in the future. Often, a simple document explaining directions to evolve the system into based on the perceived cause. You might want to add extra read replicas, introduce degraded modes for when writes aren't available, moving some functions to their own databases, sharing big tables, and so on. With a somewhat clear roadmap, your successors don't need to panic when the next crisis appears.

For extra points, leave recordings dressed as Hari Seldon.