incremental

Introduction

Here is a summary of the findings while evaluating Incremental Partition Statistics that have been introduced in Oracle 11g.

The most important point to understand is that Incremental Partition Statistics are not "cost-free", so anyone who is telling you that you can gather statistics on the lowest level (partition or sub-partition in case of composite partitioning) without any noticeable overhead in comparison to non-incremental statistics (on the lowest level) is not telling you the truth.

Although this might be obvious I've already personally heard someone making such claims so it's probably worth to mention.

In principle you need to test on your individual system whether the overhead that is added to each statistics update on the lowest level outweighs the overhead of actually gathering statistics on higher levels, of course in particular on global level.