Guy Glantser goes looking for stats:
A few weeks ago, I published a blog post titled “When Statistics Stay Empty Forever: A Hidden Edge Case with Empty Tables”
In that post, I described a scenario where statistics are created on an empty table, resulting in a statistics object without a histogram. If AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS is disabled and your maintenance solution doesn’t explicitly update statistics whose modification_counter is NULL, those statistics may never get a histogram – even after the table grows to millions or billions of rows.
Recently, I ran into another case involving missing histograms.
In this case, Guy found a table with 7 million rows and no histograms. Click through to see how that’s possible.