Recently I needed to modify a MySQL database from a latin1 character set to a utf8 character set which I may write an article on later however when importing the MySQL dumped data back into a new database I received an error complaining about the packet size. This can easily be worked around using the information below.
If you have the resources (CPU + RAM) available on your server then its can be a great troubleshooting tool if you enable MySQL logging which includes server messages, SQL query logs, and slow query logs. If you do not have the resources I would suggest only enable minimal logging such as only server messages and the slow query log since enabling all queries to be written to a file can become expensive rather quickly. Below I discuss enabling three different types of MySQL logging, adding a MySQL configuration file to logrotate, and configuring root to run mysqladmin commands without having to type the password out each time.