A computer program product provides accurate statistics in real time. These statistics can be used to determine if a table space in a database management system (DBMS) requires maintenance operations such as reorganization, back up, fresh access path statistics, and/or larger disk space allocation. The DBMS maintains a set of values that provide indications of whether that operation is due on that object. The indicators are asynchronously externalized in dedicated database tables either periodically in user-specified intervals or at some predefined event such as stopping the database. When the user performs a database administration operation, the database management system resets the associated indicators, and reports objects that are in an exception state based on the indicators collected as described for each operation.