METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR SAMPLE SIZE DETERMINATION FOR DATABASE OPTIMIZERS

A system and method for determining an adequate sample size for statistics collection is disclosed. A mechanism for automatically determining an adequate sample size for both statistics and histograms is provided. The sample size determination is accomplished via an iterative approach where the process starts with a small sample, and for each attribute which may need more data, the sample size is increased while restricting the information collected to only those attributes that require the larger sample.