I agree, these kinds of function are common. My concern was how to trigger them 
when running in a virtual machine running Linux with no vendor support for that 
configuration. 

I was told over the weekend that Linux has a SigQuiesce signal that fires in 
this situation. That at least points me in the right direction. 

Sorry for the malformed and tangential question,
Nick

On Mar 3, 2014, at 6:34 AM, Steven Harris <steve AT STEVENHARRIS DOT INFO> 
wrote:

> Nick,
> 
> are you aware that Oracle has ALTER DATABASE SUSPEND/RESUME and DB2 has SET
> WRITE SUSPEND/RESUME for DATABASE ? These allow you to stop io while you
> take a snapshot, and resume afterwards.
> I assume any mature  DBMS would have something similar to these.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Steve
> 
> Steven Harris
> TSM SME
> Canberra Australia