matt stockham (9/24/2008)
Re. inserts ... wouldn't it have to write an entire page of null bytes, so still the same data size?Logically it shouldn't need to do anything at all with a new page - the snapshot won't care because the page didn't exist at the time it was created.
You're assuming that inserts are put into new pages. That's not always true. Inserts will be added to existing pages until SQL needs a new page. So inserts will be affected by snapshots in these cases.