Mischa,
Okay, although given the track record of page-based sampling for n-distinct, it's a bit like looking for your keys under the streetlight, rather than in the alley where you dropped them :-)
Bad analogy, but funny.
The issue with page-based vs. pure random sampling is that to do, for example, 10% of rows purely randomly would actually mean loading 50% of pages. With 20% of rows, you might as well scan the whole table.
Unless, of course, we use indexes for sampling, which seems like a *really good* idea to me ....
But doesn't an index only sample one column at a time, whereas with page-based sampling, you can sample all of the columns at once. And not all columns would have indexes, though it could be assumed that if a column doesn't have an index, then it doesn't matter as much for calculations such as n_distinct.
But if you had 5 indexed rows in your table, then doing it index wise means you would have to make 5 passes instead of just one.
Though I agree that page-based sampling is important for performance reasons.
John =:->
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