Auto Stats may corrupt Statistics and decrease performance
Another reason to turn off Auto Update Statistics
We have found (beyond a reasonable doubt - even at a certain company’s internal SQLServer databases) that statistics for SQLServer seem to get corrupt from the optimizers point of view over time.
One theory is that auto stats may contribute to that. It’s gotten so bad on some of our databases that we have to update stats every hour in order to be sure we ‘fix’ the situation as soon as possible after it happens. We plan on testing the difference with auto statistics on vs off on our databases and see what kind of performance differences we get and if there is any noticeable drop in corrupted statistics.