Hello,
I'm investigating options for an environment which has about a dozen servers and several dozen databases on each, and they occasionally need to run huge reports which slow down other services. This is of course "legacy code". After some discussion, the idea is to offload these reports to separate servers - and that would be fairly straightforward if not for the fact that the report code creates temp tables which are not allowed on read-only hot standby replicas.
So, the next best thing would be to fiddle with the storage system and make lightweight snapshots of live database clusters (their storage volumes) and mount them on the reporting servers when needed for the reports. This is a bit messy :-)
I'm basically fishing for ideas. Are there any other options available which would offer fast replication-like behaviour ?
If not, what practices would minimise problems with the storage snapshots idea? Any filesystem options?