Re: Inconsistency in owner assignment between INDEX and STATISTICS

Thank you for the additional context, Tom. That makes the design intent
much clearer.
Cross-table statistics, if realized, would be a significant improvement for
join cardinality estimation; looking forward to seeing that develop.

Regards,
Joshua Shin

On Mon, Mar 16, 2026 at 5:09 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Shin Berg <sjh910805(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > Thank you for the detailed feedback, Amit.
> > You're right on both points. I had been comparing STATISTICS against
> INDEX
> > and treating the difference as an inconsistency, but as you point out,
> > INDEX ownership is special — it's tied to the table and intentionally not
> > user-adjustable. STATISTICS follows the same ownership model as VIEW (the
> > creator becomes the owner), which is consistent and by design.
>
> One point that was not mentioned is that while indexes are necessarily
> tied to a single table, statistics objects might not always be. The
> long-term hope is to allow statistics on cross-table combinations of
> columns, which is why the syntax was intentionally set up to look like
> SELECT. So, just like views, it's reasonable to give them independent
> ownership.
>
> regards, tom lane
>