I got a question last week from a very smart fellow:
How can I tell when statistics were last updated for a heap?
Before I could email him back, I soon got another email in which he answered his own question.
Working with maintenance plans is supposed to be easy, but I find it to be quite difficult.
When I was recently working on the course, “Should Developers Manage Index Maintenance?” I explained that in my experience, statistics maintenance can make more of a difference to performance than index maintenance can.
Nonclustered indexes are awesome in SQL Server: they can get you huge performance gains.
But we can’t always create the perfect index for every query. And sometimes when SQL Server finds an index that isn’t quite perfect and decides to use it, it might make your query slower instead of faster.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.