Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Using Database Snapshots from a Mirror for Reporting

A powerful configuration to help offload reporting workload is to use database snapshots with database mirroring. A database snapshot is a highly efficient feature of SQL Server 2012 that allows for the generation and use of a read-only, stable view of a database at a moment in time (hence, it’s called a snapshot). The database snapshot is also created without the overhead of creating a complete copy of the database or having completely redundant storage. A database snapshot is simply a reference point of the pages used in the database (that is defined in the system catalog). When pages are updated, a new page chain is started that contains the data pages changed since the database snapshot ...