How to gather optimal statistics.
Optimal statistics is necessary to obtain optimal plans for queries. But gathering optimal statistics is very dependent on things such as the dml activity, size of the table, the type of queries ran against the table, if the tables are partitioned,etc. Although automatic statistics gathering was introduced in 10g, there may still be times when statistics need to be manually gathered or not gathered. So with so many variables such as the database version, review our one stop note for all the version and suggestions on how to gather statistics:
How To: Gather Statistics for the Cost Based Optimizer (