Incremental statistics

A major problem with updating statistics in large tables in SQL Server was that the entire table always had to be sampled, even if only recent data had changed. This was also true when partitioning was being used: even if only the newest partition had changed since the last time statistics were updated, updating statistics again required sampling the entire table, including all the partitions that hadn’t changed. Incremental statistics, a feature introduced with SQL Server 2014, can help with this problem.

Using incremental statistics, you can only update the statistics on the partition or partitions that have been modified, and the information on these partitions will be merged with the existing information to create the final statistics object. Another advantage of incremental statistics is that the percentage of data changes required to trigger an automatic update of the statistics now works at the partition level, instead of the table level. Unfortunately...