Deciding which approach to use comes down to knowing what is most important
for your system: uptime or zero data loss. Be sure that the business owners of the system
understand the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.
Understanding Other Uses for Database Snapshots
Snapshots are far more than just a disaster recovery tool. In fact, disaster recovery is
probably the least of their many uses. The following sections briefly introduce you to
some of the other benefits that can be had from using snapshots.
Point-in-Time Reporting
In environments where data changes frequently, it can be useful to create a snapshot to
keep a history of the state of a database. You could create a snapshot each month and use
that to compare sales data from month to month. Of course, you could achieve the same
thing by using Reporting Services and using historical reports.
CHAPTER 9 n DATABASE SNAPSHOTS 239
Creating a Reporting Interface to a Mirrored Database
One way to leverage the standby end of a database mirror configuration is to create a
snapshot of that database. Users can then at least have a read-only view of the data.
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