No there is no such command though being able to reset the stats would be helpful for some cases indeed.

Sure. You run ANALYZE if your data changed or may be after your loaded data with bunch of inserts (as there will be no cardinality info in the table in this case). MySQL does not use ANALYZE stats at all for many simple queries. MySQL also does not store any “skew” information which optimizer could use.

Sure the usefulness of ANALYZE is often overestimated and I frequently catch people doing ANALYZE much more frequently when they need. Analyze also works differently for MyISAM and Innodb – for Innodb it is “10 random dives” so it is very approximate for MyISAM it is index scan so it is possible to have accurate data though as table can be changed the next second being 100% exact is not the goal for ANALYZE.

Analyze does not really have anything to do with Auto Increment handling. Innodb may forget some values it gave out already after restart but this is design implication.

Main thing the optimizers are looking for are cardinality values on your indexes and skewing. If neither of those changes appreciably, then neither will your plans and in the meantime you’ll have burned up some set of server resources (and a lock) gathering stats.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-auto-increment-handling.html

That page appears to say no, but it seem to me that something that would make sense to pull stats on when an ANALYZE is run. Any thoughts?

Analyze with Innodb is useful in two ways. First Innodb only updates stats when table is opened first time so if your MySQL server has very long uptime the statistics can become out of sync, just as with MyISAM. Second because Innodb does not have accurate stats it is possible for query plans to break after MySQL restart (because stats are way off compared to last start) and running Analyze allows to fix it. It is also possible for multiple slaves to have different stats and so plans which can be fixed same silly way – by running ANALYZE until plans are same.