SQL Clone is a very handy device for database developers. The main thing stopping me from initially using it more widely was culture shock. It is a new and strange experience to be able to have several local copies of the database I'm developing without worrying about disk space and without having to fuss about keeping them up to date. This means that I can create a series of cloned databases and then migrate each one to a different version without requiring enormous amounts of storage.
Even more of a shock is being able to make radical changes to the data or schema while testing in the knowledge that it takes only a few seconds to revert the database back to its original state, ready for the next test run. I'll show how to use SQL Clone, the database provisioning component of SQL Provision, to achieve all this. With a bit of additional scripting, you can even revert a copy of the database without worrying too much about losing any schema changes by using SQL Compare to compare the altered database with an unadulterated clone and save any changes as scripts in files.