Re: ANALYZE sampling is too good

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> I'm not actually sure there is any systemic bias here. The larger
> number of rows per block generate less precise results but from my
> thought experiments they seem to still be accurate?

So I've done some empirical tests for a table generated by:
create table sizeskew as (select i,j,repeat('i',i) from
generate_series(1,1000) as i, generate_series(1,1000) as j);

I find that using the whole block doesn't cause any problem with the
avg_width field for the "repeat" column.That does reinforce my belief
that we might not need any particularly black magic here.

It does however cause a systemic error in the histogram bounds. It
seems the median is systematically overestimated by more and more the
larger the number of rows per block are used:

1: 524
4: 549
8: 571
12: 596
16: 602
20: 618 (total sample slightly smaller than normal)
30: 703 (substantially smaller sample)

So there is something clearly wonky in the histogram stats that's
affected by the distribution of the sample. The only thing I can think
of is maybe the most common elements are being selected preferentially
from the early part of the sample which is removing a substantial part
of the lower end of the range. But even removing 100 from the
beginning shouldn't be enough to push the median above 550.

-- 
greg