I have a production MySQL server, fairly heavily loaded with an INSERT-only load on one of its databases. I'd like to attach a non-production (sitting on my desk, more or less) replication slave to it so I can run slow, expensive analysis queries on recently inserted data.
The slave would be outside the regular domain of our DBAs so there is a risk of it going down, running slowly, having an incompatible schema, erroring on replicated statements, etc. What risks does this pose to the availability and performance of the master?
Given my limited ability to configure the master and complete control over the slave, is there anything I can do to mitigate these risks or shift them towards the (unimportant) slave?