SQL SERVER – DBCC CLONEDATABASE Error – Msg 2601: Cannot Insert Duplicate Key Row in Object ‘sys.sysowners’ With Unique Index ‘nc1’.

A few days ago, I wrote a blog about an error while creating a clone of a database using DBCC CLONEDATABASE command. Here is the link to read that blog. SQL SERVER – DBCC CLONEDATABASE Error: Cannot Insert Duplicate Key Row In Object ‘sys.sysschobjs’ With Unique Index ‘clst’.

Here is another error received by me while running DBCC CLONEDATABASE. The message looks very similar but different system table.

Database cloning for ‘SQLAUTH’ has started with target as ‘SQLAUTH_CLONE’.
Msg 2601, Level 14, State 1, Line 1
Cannot insert duplicate key row in object ‘sys.sysowners’ with unique index ‘nc1’. The duplicate key value is (Domain\DBReader).

WORKAROUND/SOLUTION for CLONEDATABASE

Since it was appearing again, I started reading more about it and documentation from Microsoft says below:

DBCC CLONEDATABASE doesn’t support the creation of a clone if there are any user objects (tables, indexes, schemas, roles, and so on) that were created in the model database. If user objects are present in the model database, the database clone fails with the following error message:

Msg 2601, Level 14, State 1, Line 1
Cannot insert duplicate key row in object with unique index ‘index name’. The duplicate key value is

That makes perfect sense. As per documentation, I need to drop the object from the model database. As per error message which I received, it was due to a user in the model database. Once I dropped user, it went fine.

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Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)

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