When I used to work in an office I had a stack of flash cards and occasionally I'd grab a few, see if I still knew them and the answers and I'd walk around and discuss them with some of the other DBA's.


At Pragmatic Works I do this on our DBA DL list and I've been debating doing an occasional Question of the day series.  This Blog is inspired by a #SQLHELP conversation that I just saw my friend Mike Fal (@Mike_Fal| Blog) have regarding this very subject.  So here we go, first topic we will tackle in the old bag of flash cards:

What are Statistics and how are they used?