This is very cool - an undocumented option to UPDATE STATISTICS that allows you to fool the server into thinking a table has more rows or pages than it actually has - very useful for testing. See this blog post on the old Query Optimizer team blog. Thanks to Tony Rogerson for pointing it out.
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About Paul Randal - MSFT
Paul started in the industry in 1994 working for DEC on the VMS file system and check/repair tools.
In 1999 he moved to Microsoft to work on SQL Server, specifically on DBCC. For SQL Server 2000, he concentrated on index fragmentation (writing DBCC INDEXDEFRAG and DBCC SHOWCONTIG) plus various algorithms in DBCC CHECKDB. During SQL Server 2005 development Paul was the lead developer/manager of one the core dev teams in the Storage Engine, responsible for data access and storage (DBCC, allocation, indexes & heaps, pages/records, text/LOB storage, snapshot isolation, etc). He also spent several years rewriting DBCC CHECKDB and repair. For SQL Server 2008, Paul managed the Program Management team for the core Storage Engine to become more focused on customer/partner engagement and feature set definition.
In 2007, after 8.5 years on the SQL Server team, Paul left Microsoft to join his wife, Kimberly Tripp, running SQLskills.com and pursuing his passion for presenting and consulting.
Paul regularly presents at conferences and user groups around the world on high-availability, disaster recovery and Storage Engine internals. His popular blog is at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/.
