Hi Mark Yelton,

3.  Performance of the source database is reduced, due to increased I/O on the source database resulting from a copy-on-write operation to the snapshot every time a page is updated.

The user needs to use the Snapshot feature judiciously.If the snapshot is taken for a database which undergoes lots of changes,then it would hit the performance of the source database.This is because the when the page gets updated,the original page has to be written to the sparse file.Snapshot is ideal for databases with not too  many updates/deletes.

Please feel free to mail me at srivathsani_m@infosys.com for any further queries.

Regards,

S.Srivathsani