Analyze database for right statistics

Different DBAs have different views on % for analyze. The oracle documentation recommends to carry full analyze on entire database which is not possible for most live systems runnning into terabytes.
In past I had performance issue on my database just over 300 GB. There were one table ORDER_DATA with 400 million rows. That one table pulled entire system down number of times just because it wasn’t properly analyzed and oracle didn’t knew data distribution in the table.
I was struggling to understand where things are going wrong as we were analysing entire table every night but not with hash buckets-histograms and surprisingly in SQL execution it was using a right index.

After spending days & weeks investigating the issue, I reanalyzed it with new oracle API for histograms and SQL which used to take between 15-60 min started running at less than 100 milliseconds.

What to look for?
First check STATSPACK and find out the most active tables.
Analyse most active tables once a week with 10-15% sampling
For BIG tables start with 1% sampling and buld over period of time
I also observed adding parallel option in ANALYZE can reduce time taken significantly.

— Added to 9i init.ora
— parallel_automatic_tuning=true
— parallel_max_servers=16
— parallel_min_servers=4
— Changed percent to 1, all idx cols changed degree to 16 from 10
begin
dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(ownname=>’USER’,tabname =>’TABLE_NAME’,
estimate_percent => 1,method_opt=>’for all indexed columns’,
degree=>16,CASCADE=>TRUE);
end ;

begin
dbms_stats.gather_schema_stats(ownname=>’USER’,
estimate_percent => 20,method_opt=>’for all indexed columns’,
degree=>16,CASCADE=>TRUE);
end ;

Other Examples         

GATHER_DATABASE_STATS(estimate_percent,block_sample,method_opt,degree, granularity,cascade,stattab,statid, options,statown,gather_sys,no_invalidate,gather_temp,gather_fixed,stattype);
GATHER_INDEX_STATS (ownname,indname,partname,estimate_percent,stattab,statid,statown,degree,granularity,no_invalidate,stattype);
GENERATE_STATS(ownname,objname,organized);
GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS (gathering_mode,interval,stattab,statid,statown);
GATHER_TABLE_STATS (ownname,tabname,partname,estimate_percent,block_sample,method_opt,degree,granularity,cascade,stattab,statid,statown,no_invalidate,stattype);
GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS(ownname,estimate_percent,block_sample,method_opt,degree,granularity,cascade, stattab,statid,options,statown,no_invalidate,gather_temp,gather_fixed);