pgsql@mohawksoft.com writes:
> One of the things that is disturbing to me about the analyze settings is
> that it wants to sample the same number of records from a table regardless
> of the size of that table.
The papers that I looked at say that this rule has a good solid
statistical foundation, at least for the case of estimating histograms.
See the references cited in analyze.c.
regards, tom lane