The Most Useless Metalink Article Ever

In reference to the blog on gathering statistics, it occured to me that we could just use the statistics table functionality of DBMS_STATS to store the results of different methods of gathering statistics.

Having created a statistics table I went in search of the definitions of it's columns and came across this article at MetaLink, bulletin 1074354.6 titled "DBMS_STATS.CREATE_STAT_TABLE: What Do Table Columns Mean?".

It gives a list of the columns of the table, then helpfully adds, "The documentation states: "The columns and types that compose this table are not relevant as it should be accessed solely through the procedures in this package (dbms_stats)."

So having dedicated a bulletin to this topic, and having shown us the columns and types, we are then told that it's none of our business what they are or what they mean anyway.

Hey thanks, MetaLink!