I am getting more attracted to your suggestion of making these things stand-alone commands "CREATE STATISTICS" and "DROP STATISTICS". Not only does that fix the syntactic problems of shoehorning them into ALTER TABLE, but it would be possible to design the syntax to allow for straightforward extension to multiple-table cases. Even if we don't know what we'd do with that just yet, it seems to me like a possible future extension that we should keep in mind. And anything based on ALTER TABLE just cannot do that reasonably.
+1
Good argument, so now I understand and agree with Tomas' original suggestion
So consider
CREATE STATISTICS name ON table(columnlist) [, table(columnlist) ...] [ WITH options ]
Seems good
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Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
