Statistics poll

Thanks to everyone for spreading the link and participating in the poll on statistics. As it was pointed out in the comments, the poll isn’t very specific, I know. My point was to get an idea how many people use the defaults (I considered Oracle version 11g) for stats collection, how many do a very simple and reasonable tweak to get more stable execution plans, and how many people prefer custom statistics management. Well, I think the results will not change much and here are as following (326 votes at the time of writing):

• 42% use the defaults (if you truncate the value. I can’t put something other than 42 here, sorry guys )
• 16% don’t like unexpected histograms and prefer to take situation under control
• OMG another 42% (since it’s not Russian elections it has to be 100% in total, you know) use custom statistics management

Nice! Now we know that the defaults are suited to less than a half of Oracle installations. And my opinion is there would be more than a half using the defaults, should Oracle decided to switch the default METHOD_OPT value to ‘FOR ALL COLUMNS SIZE REPEAT’. Consider Tim Hall’s reply “On low priority systems the defaults are fine in many cases”, and think about why defaults are fine for such systems? My humble opinion is: nobody cares about low priority systems. So it doesn’t really matter if it’s reliable or not, whether there are histograms present or not, whether a system is stable or not – it’s low priority anyway. It will survive somehow. For me it means it’s not too much of a problem to go back to the future and modify default METHOD_OPT so that no histograms are gathered initially by default – as all should do manually now /me thinks.
PS. I wouldn’t mind switching GATHER_TEMP back to the FALSE and returning it to the documentation too, as it was in 9i.

Filed under: Oracle Tagged: statistics