Oracle Database 11g—Underground Advice for Database Administrators

Gathering statistics

There is the Oracle-supplied package DBMS_STATS that will calculate statistics for a table (entire schema or the entire database), which is considered the replacement for the older (legacy) compute statistics command for calculating the cost of a query. Using the DBMS_STATS package will be your primary method for regulating statistics gathering on any database 10g and above, along with the startup initialization parameters of TIMED_STATISTICS and STATISTICS_LEVEL .

11g puts statistics gathering under the larger umbrella of Automatic Maintenance Tasks Management or AutoTask , which is used in conjunction with the resource manager so that jobs (like statistics gathering) are sure to complete successfully within the resource ...