Graceful Handling Of DB Connectivity Failures

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
I am looking for a recommendation on the best way to handle an invalid database connection gracefully. I use CI to log access to portions of my site ... these access logs are written to MySQL. I'd like to be able to configure CI to disregard DB connectivity errors in the circumstance that the DB is down for maintenance. That is, I'd like to ignore errors if the DB cannot be connected to. In the current configs, if the database is not available, I get the default error...

A Database Error Occurred
Unable to connect to your database server using the provided settings.

Is there a way to suppress this in CI or ActiveRecord to ignore these errors?