Faking Oracle statistics?

Question

Is there a way to force the Oracle too "see" a table and associated indexes as being bigger than they really are?

In other words, is there a way to "fake" database statistics, so the cost based optimizer would make decisions on a nearly-empty database, that are closer to decisions that would be made in a real, big production database?

The idea is to be able to experiment (vis-a-vis execution plan) with various indexing / querying / (de)normalization strategies very early in the database design process, without wasting time writing code that fills it with representative test data (most of which will end-up being discarded anyway, since the database design is still not settled).

Importing statistics is out of question, since the production database does not even exist yet.

Answer 1

Sure. The DBMS_STATS package has a number of procedures that allow you to force statistics on objects. There are dbms_stats.set_table_stats and dbms_stats.set_index_stats procedures, for example.