Yes, mostly : essentially, we'd need several copies of some of our
databases, so that we can strip information from some copies. The
reason we want to do this is because this information is to be backed
up a bit differently.
We could do it simply by copying the files and editing them directly (or
starting a second RDBMS instance), but as the dataset in question is
rather large (2TB), we'd rather skip the copy operation. So we came to
the FlexClone idea. The question is : does this sounds implementable ?
Yes, sounds like a good use-case for flexclones.
We are also thinking about using FlexClone for rapid switching
between dev and prod environments, but the main need is the above one.
I'm not a DBA, so maybe it's my lack of understanding in the topic area, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by rapid switching between dev and prod environments. But with mysql you could bring the DB down, change the datadir variable in the my.cnf file to point to the new data files and then bring mysql back up on those. Is that what you mean?
OK. Does Oracle for example offer some possibility of hot-switching
between two database backends (because if Oracle doesn't, I seriously
doubt MySQL will)?
Don't know, but I don't think so.
Maybe there is a possibility that you rename the database in the clone. This way maybe you could create a symbolic link in your systems mysql datadir to the "new" database, which is actually a renamed clone of the prod db, then bring the db up in the currently running instance of mysql, just under a different name. Google around a bit for mysql symbolic links.
HTH's,