Manfred Koizar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> You'd run the Vitter >> algorithm separately to decide whether to keep or discard each live row >> you find in the blocks you read.
> You mean once a block is sampled we inspect it in any case? This was > not the way I had planned to do it, but I'll keep this idea in mind. Well, once we've gone to the trouble of reading in a block we definitely want to count the tuples in it, for the purposes of extrapolating the total number of tuples in the relation. Given that, I think the most painless route is simply to use the Vitter algorithm with the number-of-tuples-scanned as the count variable. You could dump the logic in acquire_sample_rows that tries to estimate where to read the N'th tuple from. If you like I can send you the Vitter paper off-list (I have a PDF of it). The comments in the code are not really intended to teach someone what it's good for ... regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings