Hi Megistral,

I understand your concern, but sometimes, time is of the essence…

Remember you will be running with a transaction isolation level of READ UNCOMMITTED , and you’ll only be SELECTing from a relatively small set of data.

You can also use a restricted non-admin account on your production database, preventing you from doing “Whoops!” queries (You can swap to an admin account when you need to do updates).

And if you use SQL Server 2008 (and above), you can change the status bar color when you are on the production database, this might also help prevent errors. http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/361832/update-status-bar-colour-when-changing-connections

A note about the article, I’ve seen stats exported before, with the purpose of updating certain stats details (e.g. number of rows in table/index), such that when you run a query’s estimated execution plan, you will see the plan for that changed number of rows. It’s quite useful for determining how the query plan changes as the number of rows change (useful for capacity planning?!).

Thanks

Ian