GATHER STATISTICS - DEGREE OPTION

 Hi.

One of our applications has volatile tables with new partitions added each month,and I run daily overnight (STALE) stats collection.

Without current Partition and Global stats,we tend to get sub-optimal plans,but it can take several eves to collect all req'd stats.

I have been testing using different options for the DEGREE parameter,in an attempt to speed up the collection, using :-

-  No Clause (uses DEGREE clause of table which is 1)
-  DEGREE=1 thru to 50
-  AUTO_DEGREE

When testing with a medium size table (10 partitions, 400Mb), a number of parallel process is created as expected (ish).
The timings show that the collect time improves as the number of parallel processes increases,then dips if the number is too high.