One of my favorite features, especially when dealing with big databases is partitioning, they have been around since Oracle 8.0, and a lot has evolved and improved over the years. Although they are widely used there is still some basic principles that seems to fall through the cracks of our busy DBA life.
The one issue that I encounter relatively often is the misunderstanding of “why” and “how” Oracle will use the Global stats and what to do when my table is too big that it just takes forever to gather stats, on this post I will cover the first part of this issue “why” and “how”, for the second part, I will post below several papers, blogs and books that you should look to understand all options available.
Rodrigo Righetti DBA 