I think you are confused about ZFS clones. You never stop a production application for a clone because the clone is made from a snapshot. It also is copy on wri

I think you are confused about ZFS clones. You never stop a production application for a clone because the clone is made from a snapshot. It also is copy on write, so you have no massive data copy. If your application, is not crash consistent, you do need to get it to pause, flush a consistent state and do the snapshot, but the snapshot takes less than a second to do, so such a thing is probably fine. Also, if you need to stop the database for a consistent snapshot, then your database is not ACID compliant.