Table lock on SET STATISTICS

Folks,

Just noticed -- the hard way -- that running ALTER TABLE ... SET STATISTICS
requires a full table lock. I can't think of any practical reason why SET
STATISTICS would need to lock the table; presumably this is just because it's
an ALTER TABLE statement? If so, maybe we should consider a method of SET
STATISTICS which does not require a table lock? The current functionality
makes it very hard to test statistics levels on a production machine.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco