Most databases don't have "root level snapshots of the state" in the way you appear to imagine them. Leaving trivial per-transaction information ('did this tra

Most databases don't have "root level snapshots of the state" in the way you appear to imagine them. Leaving trivial per-transaction information ('did this transaction id commit', ~a few bits per xact) aside, usually it won't scale with the number of snapshots, but with the amount of change done by writing transactions.