Upgrading to a new major version involves risk, and it is important to plan the whole process carefully. In this whitepaper, we look at the important new changes in MySQL 5.7 and show you how to plan the test process. We then look at how to do a live system upgrade without downtime. For those who want to avoid connection failures during slave restarts and switchover, this document goes even further and shows you how to leverage ProxySQL to achieve a graceful upgrade process.