[tomnipotent]

I can't tell you how many times over 20 years I've heard a DBA tell me "the statistics weren't updated" after an incident.

[ovi256]

I've written cron jobs to update mysql statistics to prevent it from choosing bad query plans. It's as terrible as it sounds.

[pas]

How come it's not automatic and built-in? Why is a script terrible? (Does it have to enumerate all tables and piecewise run the stat update?)

[ovi256]

Yes, the stats update is per table. We only updated it for a few tables we really cared about.

[silon42]

This is my reason for preferring NOSQL where possible.