If you create an individual snapshot, you have the option to have this snapshot open in a read/write or read/only state. If you want to create additional indexes, views you can make use of the read/write option. Any changes made to the snapshot is only affecting the snapshot. But do keep in mind snapshots is ideally short-lived and making use of Copy-on-write technology that allows you to quickly get the snapshot, but also keeping it consistent without using a lot of disk space. But over time as the “origin or source” of the snapshot is updating the snapshot will also use more space – which means it can grow over time. Sizing the snapshot is going to be important and if it is kept for longer periods – but the ideal is that they are used short term, hours may be days, but not weeks.
Many sites will use snapshots to create a daily snapshot of the standby database, they then run batch processes on this (like index creation or materialized views etc, then the users can query this during the day. The next day, the snapshot is removed and the process repeated. The end result is during the day a consistent environment is available that can be used for data extraction.
The Snapshot Group option is read/only at this stage (it will have the option for read/write in the near future). This feature would be perfect for creating daily snapshots that are kept for one day as explained above two bullet points (but note the read/write option will only be there in the next update)
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