For the sake of brevity in this article I am going to group procedures, functions and routines together as stored procedures and ignore any differences between them.
What does the SQL command UPDATE STATISTICS FOR PROCEDURE/FUNCTION/ROUTINE does and perhaps, more pertinently, as a DBA do I need to run this regularly to ensure my systems are working efficiently? For those wanting an immediate answer I think it is “never” or “almost never“, the reasons for which I hope to explain clearly in this article.