Oh God, he's talking about statistics again Yeah, but this should be less annoying than the other times. And much shorter. You see, I hear grousing. Updating statistics was bringin' us down, man. Harshing our mellow. The statistics would just update, man, and it would take like... Forever, man. Man. But no one would actually…
tl;dr -- Not necessarily.
One of our students asked me a great question: if you update statistics on every table in the database, is that effectively the same as dumping the procedure cache on the instance? Will every execution plan have to be recompiled the next time it is run? I thought it was a great question and it spurred an interesting discussion about maintenance and recompilation.
I first knew something was up when I looked at the job history for a simple maintenance plan. It had two steps:
Rebuild all the indexes in the database - this took 10 minutes each night.
Update statistics - this took 2-3 hours each night.
