I quote Oracle 9.2 Documentation:

"There are some PL/SQL packaged procedures that effectively allow you to execute an ANALYZE statement. These are:
DBMS_UTILITY.ANALYZE_SCHEMA
DBMS_UTILITY.ANALYZE_DATABASE
DBMS_DDL.ANALYZE_OBJECT
It is recommended that these packaged procedures only be used for collecting non-optimizer statistics."

Why the recommendation for "collecting non-optimizer statistics."????? This is why I want to use these packages - for the cost based optimizer!