Matthew McGiffen takes us through the process of updating statistics:
At the heart of all the methods we’ll look at is the UPDATE STATISTICS command. There are a lot of options for using this command, but we’ll just focus on the ones you’re most likely to use. For full documentation here is the official reference:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/update-statistics-transact-sql
Even if you have an automated system, knowing how to update statistics is a great thing because you might need to run a one-off update to help a poorly-performing query. Or you’re using PolyBase, which doesn’t have the capability to perform statistics updates automatically because the data isn’t actually in SQL Server.