[Silhouette]

I am struggling to think of any time it would be appropriate to clone a production database and use it for staging. That almost inevitably translates into any developer who ever deploys database-related changes having access to the contents of the production database, or at least every part of it that might ever be affected by code changes they are making. There are numerous legal, regulatory and ethical issues with granting such broad access, unless you're small enough that the few people you obviously do need to have the ability to grant full DB access happen to include anyone who is likely to change code that talks to the database. And even then it still seems like bad practice to actually grant anyone that access when it's not strictly necessary!