Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 plug-in update 1 was released in February, 2013, introducing new cloud management features, including Schema as a Service and Snap Clone. "While the relevance of Schema as a Service is in the context of new database services, Snap Clone is useful in performing functional testing on pre-existing data," explains Sudip Datta, vice president of product management for Oracle Systems Management products, in a recent blog, “Snap Clone: Instant, self-serviced database-on-demand.”
According to Datta, “One big consumer group of cloud is QA Engineers or Testers. They perform User Acceptance Tests (UAT) for various applications. To perform an UAT, they need to create copies of the production database. For intense testing, such as in pre-upgrade scenarios, they need a full updateable copy of the production data. There are other situations, such as in functional testing, they need to perform minimal updates to the data, but at the same time, need multiple functional copies. Enterprise Manager 12c supports both the scenarios. In the former case, it leverages RMAN backups to clone the data. In the latter case, it leverages the “Copy on Write” technology at the storage layer to perform Enterprise Manager 12c Snap Clone (or just Snap Clone). Currently, NAS technologies viz. Netapp and ZFS Storage Appliance are supported for Snap Clone. By using this technology, the entire data does not need to be cloned, but the new database can physically point to the source blocks within the same filer and only needs to allocate new blocks if there are updates to the cloned copy.” Read on.