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In your experience, how often should Oracle database statistics be run? Our team of developers recently discovered that statistics hadn’t been run our production box in over 2 1/2 months. That sounds like a long time to me, but I’m not a DBA.
At my last job we ran statistics once a week. If I remember correctly, we scheduled them on a Thursday night, and on Friday the DBAs were very careful to monitor the longest running queries for anything unexpected. (Friday was picked because it was often just after a code release, and tended to be a fairly low traffic day.) When they saw a bad query they would find a better query plan and save that one so it wouldn’t change again unexpectedly. (Oracle has tools to do this for you automatically, you tell it the query to optimize and it does.)
Many organizations avoid running statistics out of fear of bad query plans popping up unexpectedly. But this usually means that their query plans get worse and worse over time. And when they do run statistics then they encounter a number of problems. The resulting scramble to fix those issues confirms their fears about the dangers of running statistics. But if they ran statistics regularly, used the monitoring tools as they are supposed to, and fixed issues as they came up then they would have fewer headaches, and they wouldn’t encounter them all at once.