Re: improper estimates even with high statistic values - Mailing list pgsql-bugs

Magnus's case seemed like a beast of a different animal to me, given it
was a direct index scan using a wildcard based search on a primary key
column; I'd agree I don't know exactly how it would determine a value
different that 1.

But in my example, this misestimation comes between columns that are not
primary keys, contain duplicate values (so they are aren't unique), and
involves left joining subqueries. It doesn't seem to follow that it
would always reduce to 1 row quite so easily.


Robert Treat

On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 16:11, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> Magnus reported a similar problem with path names.  I looked at his
> statistics and found that even at 100 buckets, his LIKE 'f:/.../%" query
> would never span more than one bucket, and because all the path names
> were unique, there were no most common values.
>
> In the case where the LIKE hits only one bucket, and there are no most
> common values, how is the optimzier supposed to estimate the number of
> rows, especially for cases where the values in the buckets are unevenly
> distributed.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Robert Treat wrote:
> > After some extensive discussion on irc, berkus, myself and a few others
> > think we have uncovered a possible bug, or at the least some odd
> > behavior in > 8.1.1. It centers around my recent post to performance
> > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2006-01/msg00248.php
> > and how I could not seem to get some of the estimates to become
> > reasonable even after bumping up my stats target to 400 which caused
> > every row to be analyzed. If you look at the left join and hash join
> > estimates of the third query you'll note they seem to always get
> > estimated to 1 for no reason that we could come up with.
> >
> > Someone else on irc seemed to have a similar problem to this, so we are
> > wondering if there is some problem here. So the question really is if
> > someone can deduce the behavior from looking at what was provided in the
> > email? If not and you have questions let me know, otherwise I can send a
> > chopped up test database which can reproduce the query issues off list
> > should someone want to walk through the pg code to investigate. TIA
> >
> >
> > Robert Treat
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