If you’ve ever run DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS,  you know you get 3 sections of information back. The first section is basic information about the last time the statistics were updated, the number of rows, the number of steps, etc. The second section is density information for each left-based subset of columns. The third section is the histogram for the first column in the statistics. I won't be going into detail on what any of these things mean (i.e. steps, density, histogram), but you can get lots more information from this whitepaper:

Statistics Used by the Query Optimizer in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

What you might not know is that you can get each of the three sections independently by adding an option to the DBCC command:

DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS ('AdventureWorks.Person.Contact',
'IX_Contact_EmailAddress') WITH STAT_HEADER;

DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS ('AdventureWorks.Person.Contact',
'IX_Contact_EmailAddress') WITH DENSITY_VECTOR;

DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS ('AdventureWorks.Person.Contact',
'IX_Contact_EmailAddress') WITH HISTOGRAM;

These options are documented as part of the DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS command for SQL Server 2005. These options were actually available in SQL Server 2000, but they just aren’t documented. 

In SQL Server 2005, the first section contains a column of output called "String Index", which I like to call "String Statistics". I just wrote an article for www.SQLCommunity.com about what these string statistics do for you.

http://www.sqlcommunity.com/default.aspx?tabid=77&id=178

Have fun!

~Kalen