Is there a reason to update statistics manually?
Sure, if your data is changing more frequently than the rate of auto stats (or, say, you are updating &lt; 20% of the rows frequently, like updating statuses or date/time stamps). Or if your table is huge and it is not changing enough to trigger auto stats updates. Or if you have filtered indexes (since the auto stats threshold is still based on the % of change on the whole table, not the % of change of the subset of rows in the filtered index).