Re: Gsoc2012 idea, tablesample

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> The trouble is, AFAICS, that you can't bound M very well without
> scanning the whole table.  I mean, it's bounded by theoretical
> limit, but that's it.
What would the theoretical limit be?  (black size - page header size
- minimum size of one tuple) / item pointer size?  So, on an 8KB
page, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1350?  Hmm.  If that's right,
that would mean a 1% random sample would need 13.5 probes per page,
meaning there wouldn't tend to be a lot of pages missed.  Still, the
technique for getting a random sample seems sound, unless someone
suggests something better.  Maybe we just want to go straight to a
seqscan to get to the pages we want to probe rather than reading
just the ones on the "probe list" in physical order?
-Kevin