analyze tables in oracle
Recently I came across a situation where users were not able to retrieve data in oracle applications. the systems hangs up after submitting a search. we had no idea as why that was happening. We checked for table locks and eveyrthing looks good. Data is inserted or updated depending upon the nightly jobs ran every day. The last think my team lead suggested me to get table analyzed with a DBA. After he had analyzed the table the system worked fine. Now I have no idea what the analyze table would. I tried to search on google and couldn't find easy understandable points. I really want to know what happend through Analyzing table. I heard that it generates statistic, what statistics?
Please help me here.