On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 9:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
AlexK987 <alex.cue.987@gmail.com> writes: > The documentation states that "The extent of analysis can be controlled by > adjusting the default_statistics_target configuration variable". It looks > like I can tell Postgres to create more histograms with more bins, and more > distinct values. This implicitly means that Postgres will use a larger > random subset to calculate statistics.
> However, this is not what I want. My data may be quite skewed, and I want > full control over the size of the sample. I want to explicitly tell Postgres > to analyze the whole table. How can I accomplish that?
You can't, and you wouldn't want to if you could, because that would result in slurping the entire table into backend local memory. All the rows constituting the "random sample" are held in memory while doing the statistical calculations.
In practice, the only stat that would be materially improved by taking enormously large samples would be the number-of-distinct-values estimate. There's already a way you can override ANALYZE's estimate of that number if you need to.
The accuracy of the list of most common values could also be improved a lot by increasing the sample.