Joey D’Antony takes us through stats management with the serverless tier of Azure SQL Database:
One of the only things platform as a service databases like Azure SQL Database do not do for you is actively manage column and index statistics. While backups, patches, and even integrity checks are built into the platform services, managing your metadata is not. Since Azure SQL Database lacks a SQL Sever Agent for scheduling, you have to use an alternative for job scheduling.
Read on to learn about techniques as well as a few gotchas.