Symptoms
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and 2017 currently allows incremental statistics to be created on nonclustered indexes that are not aligned to the base table partitioning scheme. This is an incorrect behavior and following this fix, any attempt to create statistics on nonclustered indexes that are not aligned with the base table will result in an error. An incremental statistics object which has been improperly created will silently be replaced with standard statistics after its next update.
Status
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
Resolution
This issue is fixed in the following cumulative updates for SQL Server:
About cumulative updates for SQL Server:
Each new cumulative update for SQL Server contains all the hotfixes and all the security fixes that were included with the previous cumulative update. Check out the latest cumulative updates for SQL Server:
References
Learn about the terminology that Microsoft uses to describe software updates.
