A friend contacted me to ask why they were having problems using the table_stats hint to influence optimizer decision making and also to influence the decision to use direct read or buffer cache scan so this is just a quick blog post to clarify the syntax as it is not well documented.
table_stats(<table_name> <method> {<keyword>=<value>} )
Method is one of: DEFAULT, SET, SCALE, SAMPLE
Keyword is one of: BLOCKS, ROWS, ROW_LENGTH