When working with virtual machines often it can be very useful to have a base read-only VM then have several smaller VM's that use that larger VM as a base and write their changes to their own writeable copy.
Is something similar available in Microsoft Sql Server?
The situation I am in is we host a demo copy of our product that our clients can connect to for about 30 days or so. When we create a demo account we have to create a new copy of the base database the program uses and have the software point at that. Each image is a little over 2GB, but on average the demo users will only change about maybe 100MB worth of data in the database.
What I would like to do is have a read-only database that acts as a base then have the demo databases create a "differencing database" and write out it's data and log information to that differencing database. Is this possible? I have been searching through the MSDN documentation but I have yet to find anything and unfortunately google searching has been fairly useless as searching for Sql server differential database
gets polluted with all the pages about doing differential backups (doing Sql server differential database -backup
did not return any useful results either, all I got was information about differential deployment scripts).