SQL Server 2014 introduced DBCC CLONEDATABASE for creating a blank database with only Schema and Statistics.

SQL Server 2016 added support of the Query Store in DBCC CLONEDATABASE.

This feature is very helpful in certain conditions.
For example, Your production database size is around 800 GB, and You faced some performance related issues because the problem of outdated Statistics or Indexes issue.

Now the situation is, you can do a test and trial in your Production Database, so DBA takes a copy of Production Database and restore it in different server for further investigation.

Do you think, this is the only one solution because Its require additional time and infrastructure.

In this kind of situation, you can use the DBCC CLONEDATABASE feature of SQL Server 2014.

It creates a blank database copy with the only Schema, Statistics and Query Store information. It is not copying the data, so it does not require any additional space.

You can find the same statistical information in the new clone database which generates the same execution plan for your investigation.

A Query Execution Plan is prepared to base on Database Statistics so If Database Statistics are same then you check your query execution plan without data.

Once you are finished with your task with Clone Database, you can delete it.

How internally SQL Server creates a Clone Database?

It validates the source database and acquires the shared lock on the source database

It creates a snapshot of the source database (Include only: Schema, Statistics, Query Store)

Create Clone Database and acquires an exclusive lock on it

Copy the metadata, schema, statistics, query store information from the source database to clone database

Release all locks from Clone Database

How to create a Clone Database?

Use DBCC CLONEDATABASE command to create a Clone Database.

DBCC CLONEDATABASE (MyDatabase,MyDatabase_Clone);

SQL Server 2016 introduced a Query Store concept which helps us to monitor the performance differences between the query execution plans.

It helps you to track the query plan, run time statistics and history of query plan.

You can easily find your new query with the different execution plans and you can identify un-efficient plan and force for the better execution plan.

Once you enable the Query Store, It starts to capture a history of queries, plans and other run time statistics.

You can audit the query plans and can find information like: top n queries, CPU/IO/Memory utilization of queries and query executed in a number of times.

Enable the Query Store:

ALTER DATABASE Database_Name SET QUERY_STORE = ON;

You can use below query to find an information on Query Store:

SELECT Txt.query_text_id, Txt.query_sql_text, Pl.plan_id, Qry.*  
FROM sys.query_store_plan AS Pl  
JOIN sys.query_store_query AS Qry  
    ON Pl.query_id = Qry.query_id  
JOIN sys.query_store_query_text AS Txt  
    ON Qry.query_text_id = Txt.query_text_id;