[wolf550e]

Some databases let you just set the stats numbers to what you think they are and pin them, so changes to data won't change the stats and the optimizer will always use your stats and not stats calculated from the data. You'll get the "prod" execution plans on an empty database!

[bobbydreamer]

You can do that in Db2 z/os. In our shop we do it daily. In prod stats are up to date, we have job that would get all the stats from prod required for accesspaths and apply it on Dev empty tables modelling production. So Dev team when they bind packages which would use these stats to generate accesspaths 99.99% of the time same accesspaths would be generated in Dev and we know how the program would perform. Also for some tables we set pre defined stats, if that table a had real stats, oboy.

[mars4rp]

Sql server let you to import meta data from prod to dev. And you will get reliable execution plans.