Multiple choice technology databases

How long does it approximately take to create a snapshot of a 100GB database on a state-of-the-art Quadcore server using RAID 5?

  1. A few seconds

  2. Approximately 5 minutes

  3. Usually approximately one hour; depends on the load on the server

  4. More than one hour but it is running in the background
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A Correct answer
Explanation

Database snapshots in SQL Server use a copy-on-write mechanism and are nearly instantaneous regardless of database size. The snapshot creation process just initializes the sparse file structure - actual data copying happens gradually as writes occur to the source database. Modern hardware with RAID 5 can complete this in seconds, not minutes or hours.

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