Re: Analyzer is clueless

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 10:32:48PM +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
> The main issue is that PostgreSQL's default histogram statistics setting
> is lower than other RDBMS. This means that it is less able to
> discriminate between cases such as yours that are close to the edge.
> This is a trade-off between run-time of the ANALYZE command and the
> benefit it produces. As Joshua suggests, increasing the statistics
> target for this table will likely allow the optimizer to correctly
> determine the selectivity of the index and take the right path.

Is there still a good reason to have the histogram stats so low? Should
the default be changed to more like 100 at this point?

Also, how extensively does the planner use n_distinct, null_frac,
reltuples and the histogram to see what the odds are of finding a unique
value or a low number of values? I've seen cases where it seems the
planer doesn't think it'll be getting a unique value or a small set of
values even though stats indicates that it should be.

One final question... would there be interest in a process that would
dynamically update the histogram settings for tables based on how
distinct/unique each field was?
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel(at)decibel(dot)org
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