Kevin Grittner wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 8:13 PM, in message
> <d6d6637f0801301813n64fa58eu76385cf8a621907@mail.g mail.com>, "Christopher
> Browne" <cbbrowne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> There seems to be *plenty* of evidence out there that the performance
>> penalty would NOT be "essentially zero."
>
> I can confirm that I have had performance tank because of boosting
> the statistics target for selected columns. It appeared to be time
> spent in the planning phase, not a bad plan choice. Reducing the
> numbers restored decent performance.

One idea I've been thinking about is to add a step after the analyze, to
look at the statistics that was gathered. If it looks like the the
distribution is pretty flat, reduce the data to a smaller set before
storing it in pg_statistic.

You would still get the hit of longer ANALYZE time, but at least you
would avoid the hit on query performance where the higher statistics are
not helpful. We could also print an INFO line along the lines of "you
might as well lower the statistics target for this table, because it's
not helping".

No, I don't know how to determine when you could reduce the data, or how
to reduce it...

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

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