Since it’s introduction in Oracle Database 8i, the DBMS_STATS package is Oracle’s preferred method for gathering statistics. With each new database release the DBMS_STATS package is extended to accommodate new approaches to gather statistics and new types of statistics.
Over the years, application developers and DBAs have written hundreds of scripts using the DBMS_STATS package to help gather and manage optimizer statistics effectively. However, once written these scripts are rarely modified to take advantage of the improvements in the DBMS_STATS package, which can result in suboptimal statistics.
Oracle Database 12 Release 2 makes it a lot easier to be able to manage this vast collection of scripts by includes a new DBMS_STATS preference called PREFERENCE_OVERRIDES_PARAMETER. When this preference is set to TRUE, it allows preference settings to override the parameter values specifically set in a DBMS_STATS command.