On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Jon Nelson <jnelson+pgsql@jamponi.net> writes:
>> I ran a query recently where the result was very large. The outer-most
>> part of the query looked like this:
>
>> HashAggregate (cost=56886512.96..56886514.96 rows=200 width=30)
>> -> Result (cost=0.00..50842760.97 rows=2417500797 width=30)
>
>> The row count for 'Result' is in the right ballpark, but why does
>> HashAggregate think that it can turn 2 *billion* rows of strings (an
>> average of 30 bytes long) into only 200?
>
> 200 is the default assumption about number of groups when it's unable to
> make any statistics-based estimate. You haven't shown us any details so
> it's hard to say more than that.
What sorts of details would you like? The row count for the Result
line is approximately correct -- the stats for all tables are up to
date (the tables never change after import). statistics is set at 100
currently.
--
Jon