What is the benefit of Database Snapshots ?

  • What is the benefit of Database Snapshots , also are every DBA should deal with it daily , please explain in simple way.

  • In most cases the schedule will be set by the business and that schedule will be automated so the DBA probably won't be doing much with it.

    For me, most of the uses I have found have been related to reporting. I needed to capture data at a point in time to report on. I could copy the data or some other method but I couldn't easily just freeze a database in a particular state without snapshots.

    One of the reasons to use them is they are very easy to setup and then the system handles the under the covers work.

    CEWII

  • Testing. If I'm testing something against a test database, by using Snapshots I can restore the data back to the state it was in a few seconds rather than the 15-20 minutes that some of my backups take to restore. It also saves space on my test environment as the Snapshot is not as large as the series of backups I would normally take whilst testing.

  • When I'm deploying database changes to an Enterprise system, I'll use snapshots to make rollbacks very fast and easy should something go wrong during the deployments. I won't keep those snapshots for any length of time once we've validated that the deployment was successful.

    As for cleaning them up on a schedule, it really depends on why they're being created. What makes you think it's something you need to do on a scheduled basis?

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

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