Over the years, SQL Server Statistics have been discussed in countless blog posts, articles, and presentations, and I believe that they will remain a core topic for a while when speaking about performance. Why is that? Well, if we were to consider the equivalent of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for database performances, statistics would be a foundational needs of a database system (namely the “physiological” needs) as they are one of the most fundamental pieces of information needed to build execution plans.
That being said, accurate statistics are not likely to help in all situations: you can think of poorly