Imagine you have to troubleshoot slow running queries on a particular client database remotely.The data is sensitive and client can’t share his database..To help in this cases,

SQLServer 2016 SP1 introduced new feature called DBCC CLONE .Below is the total syntax..


DBCC clone('source db name','target db name') [WITH [NO_STATISTICS][,NO_QUERYSTORE]]

When the above command finishes,we will be having a READ ONLY clone database with the name tsqlclone ,The above command also writes to error log as well..

below is snip from my local instance..

Please refer to below KB for indepth details on how this works..

DBCC CLONEDATABASE to generate a schema and statistics only copy of a user database in SQL Server 2014 SP2 and SQL Server 2016 SP1

For earlier versions,we can use generate scripts option to generate schema ,statistics and run them on empty database to get similar functionality