SQL Server - Snapshot is useful in production environments?

735    Asked by CelinaLagunas in SQL Server , Asked on Aug 28, 2021

I'm reading about SQL Server high availability solutions and disaster recovery and among the available resources the SQL Server has a snapshot feature. In theory all seems like beautiful. I also read that a snapshot will copy a database at a point in time and you can use this to restore a database. In this answer there is a comment (by Peter Schofield, 2013) about SQL Server snapshots not having support, and is useful in a development environment for quick rollbacks.

[...] Perhaps the biggest hindrance to adoption is that Management Studio didn't offer support[...]
[...] It sounds like an ideal use of snapshots in a dev environment just for quick script deployments and quick roll backs.[...]

I would like to know if snapshots are really useful in production environments. What are some examples of usage in production, and please include personal examples about when you've used snapshots to provide a solution on production systems. The principal objective is to provide some examples of real usage and through these examples get some useful ideas for me and for everyone who will be reading this post.

In my case I use SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition in a production environment.

Answered by Claudine Tippins
    To solve sql server snapshot maybe you have used the wrong code. [...] Perhaps the biggest hindrance to adoption is that Management Studio didn't offer support[...]

By this he meant that you do not have a feature in SSMS to create a snapshot of a database, you have to rely on SQL command to create database snapshot. This is also mentioned in Create Database Snapshot official document The only way to create a SQL Server database snapshot is to use Transact-SQL. SQL Server Management Studio does not support the creation of database snapshots. I agree the use of the word "support" is not entirely clear. It should be that SSMS does not allow database snapshot creation.

    The database snapshot "may" be used in production, it totally depends on what you want from it and how it suits your requirement. Before going further please read Limitation of Database Snapshot.. Paul Randal has few more points about what can go wrong with database snapshots

Hope this works!



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