ANALYZE is one of the most overlooked maintenance operations in PostgreSQL. This command is crucial because it collects statistics about the data in your tables and stores them in the internal pg_statistic catalog table. PostgreSQL then uses these statistics to determine the most efficient query execution plan. It's important to regularly perform stats collections using Auto or Manual Analyze operation to keep the stats up-to-date.

In a rapidly growing table, ensuring that statistics are up-to-date is a key step in performance tuning. By default, the ANALYZE operation samples approximately (300 * default_statistic_target) pages in a table and stores the statistics as 100 entries. This default sampling rate is sufficient for most workloads, but for more accurate query planner estimates, you may need to adjust the default_statistic_target value in multiples of 100 and evaluate the impact on query performance.

For certain edge cases, you can use Extended Statistics to collect more detailed metrics, such as functional dependencies, the number of distinct values, and the most common values in specific columns.