Richard Foote on the Impact of stats staying the same.

I just wanted to highlight this very good posting by Richard Foote. He is talking about how SQL execution plans can change when “nothing else does”. Not the table structures, not the code, note the initialisation parameters, not even the table and index stats.

But something does change, which is what day it is (or what hour it is or what week it is). Time moves on and our data does too. If the statistics on the tables does NOT move on, then the CBO thinks that the range of data in the table does not change. So, the CBO thinks your queries are getting further and further “out of range” and so would expect to find less and less data in the tables to bring back. That will lead to plan changes.

If you have noticed my preoccupation with identifying the contents of histograms and high/low values in column stats, you may appreciate that this topic is one I have been finding is a large part of my day job.

Richard explains the point very well, as always, so go have a look.