Is running a nightly job that updates the statistics way too much? Can that affect the system's performance?
1 Answer
It depends. How long does a nightly update take? Is the update happening at a slow query period/ is auto create statistics still enabled?
Each database has two options related to statistics: auto create statistics and auto update statistics. Typically, both should be left enabled for databases. Statistics are automatically updated when certain thresholds within SQL Server are met (e.g a percentage of row changes that the stat was based on). Once the threshold is reached, SQL Server will automatically update the statistic(s) defined in the table.
If your maintenance window allows it you should certainly update statistics nightly since the auto update system is certainly not perfect.
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Thank you Jim B. I just ran the job on a smaller server without any load and it took 11 minutes to run. It should be much faster on the actual DB server. The job runs at 4 AM when no one should be on. Jan 19, 2010 at 17:20