An overview of statistics gathered by the ANALYZE command in Greenplum Database.
Statistics are metadata that describe the data stored in the database. The query optimizer needs up-to-date statistics to choose the best execution plan for a query. For example, if a query joins two tables and one of them must be broadcast to all segments, the optimizer can choose the smaller of the two tables to minimize network traffic.
The statistics used by the optimizer are calculated and saved in the system catalog by the ANALYZE
command. There are three ways to initiate an analyze operation:
ANALYZE
command directly.analyzedb
management utility outside of the database, at the command line.These methods are described in the following sections. The VACUUM ANALYZE
command is another way to initiate an analyze operation, but its use is discouraged because vacuum and analyze are different operations with different purposes.
Calculating statistics consumes time and resources, so Greenplum Database produces estimates by calculating statistics on samples of large tables. In most cases, the default settings provide the information needed to generate correct execution plans for queries. If the statistics produced are not producing optimal query execution plans, the administrator can tune configuration parameters to produce more accurate statistics by increasing the sample size or the granularity of statistics saved in the system catalog. Producing more accurate statistics has CPU and storage costs and may not produce better plans, so it is important to view explain plans and test query performance to ensure that the additional statistics-related costs result in better query performance.
Parent topic: Greenplum Database Concepts
The query planner seeks to minimize the disk I/O and network traffic required to run a query, using estimates of the number of rows that must be processed and the number of disk pages the query must access. The data from which these estimates are derived are the pg_class
system table columns reltuples
and relpages
, which contain the number of rows and pages at the time a VACUUM
or ANALYZE
command was last run. As rows are added or deleted, the numbers become less accurate. However, an accurate count of disk pages is always available from the operating system, so as long as the ratio of reltuples
to relpages
does not change significantly, the optimizer can produce an estimate of the number of rows that is sufficiently accurate to choose the correct query execution plan.
When the reltuples
column differs significantly from the row count returned by SELECT COUNT(*)
, an analyze should be performed to update the statistics.
When a REINDEX
command finishes recreating an index, the relpages
and reltuples
columns are set to zero. The ANALYZE
command should be run on the base table to update these columns.
The pg_statistic
system table holds the results of the last ANALYZE
operation on each database table. There is a row for each column of every table. It has the following columns:
n_distinct
value of -1.0. Columns with an average width greater than 1024 are considered unique.
pg_statistic
row.
NULL
if the slot kind does not involve numerical values.
NULL
if the slot kind does not store any data values. Each array's element values are actually of the specific column's data type, so there is no way to define these columns' types more specifically than
anyarray.
The statistics collected for a column vary for different data types, so the pg_statistic
table stores statistics that are appropriate for the data type in four slots, consisting of four columns per slot. For example, the first slot, which normally contains the most common values for a column, consists of the columns stakind1
, staop1
, stanumbers1
, and stavalues1
.
The stakindN
columns each contain a numeric code to describe the type of statistics stored in their slot. The stakind
code numbers from 1 to 99 are reserved for core PostgreSQL data types. Greenplum Database uses code numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 99. A value of 0 means the slot is unused. The following table describes the kinds of statistics stored for the three codes.
stakind Code | Description |
---|---|
1 | Most CommonValues (MCV) Slot
stavalues array; a unique column has no MCV slot. |
2 | Histogram Slot – describes the distribution of scalar data.
If a Most Common Values slot is also provided, then the histogram describes the data distribution after removing the values listed in the MCV array. (It is a compressed histogram in the technical parlance). This allows a more accurate representation of the distribution of a column with some very common values. In a column with only a few distinct values, it is possible that the MCV list describes the entire data population; in this case the histogram reduces to empty and should be omitted. |
3 | Correlation Slot – describes the correlation between the physical order of table tuples and the ordering of data values of this column.
|
4 | Most Common Elements Slot - is similar to a Most Common Values (MCV) Slot, except that it stores the most common non-null elements of the column values. This is useful when the column datatype is an array or some other type with identifiable elements (for instance, tsvector ).
Frequencies are measured as the fraction of non-null rows the element value appears in, not the frequency of all rows. Also, the values are sorted into the element type's default order (to support binary search for a particular value). Since this puts the minimum and maximum frequencies at unpredictable spots in
Note: For
tsvector columns, the
stavalues elements are of type
text , even though their representation within
tsvector is not exactly
text .
|
5 | Distinct Elements Count Histogram Slot - describes the distribution of the number of distinct element values present in each row of an array-type column. Only non-null rows are considered, and only non-null elements.
|
99 | Hyperloglog Slot - for leaf partitions of a partitioned table, stores the hyperloglog_counter created for the sampled data. The hyperloglog_counter data structure is converted into a bytea and stored in a stavalues5 slot of the pg_statistic catalog table. |
The pg_stats
view presents the contents of pg_statistic
in a friendlier format. The pg_stats
view has the following columns:
avg(pg_column_size(column_name))
.
n_distinct
value of -1.0. Columns with an average width greater than 1024 are considered unique.
n_distinct
column is -1,
most_common_vals
is null. The length of the array is the lesser of the number of actual distinct column values or the value of the
default_statistics_target
configuration parameter. The number of values can be overridden for a column using
ALTER TABLE table SET COLUMN column SET STATISTICS N
.
most_common_vals
array. This is the number of occurrences of the value divided by the total number of rows. The array is the same length as the
most_common_vals
array. It is null if
most_common_vals
is null.
max()
aggregate function for the column. The number of groups in the histogram is the same as the
most_common_vals
array size.
Newly created tables and indexes have no statistics. You can check for tables with missing statistics using the gp_stats_missing
view, which is in the gp_toolkit
schema:
SELECT * from gp_toolkit.gp_stats_missing;
When calculating statistics for large tables, Greenplum Database creates a smaller table by sampling the base table. If the table is partitioned, samples are taken from all partitions.
Running ANALYZE
with no arguments updates statistics for all tables in the database. This could take a very long time, so it is better to analyze tables selectively after data has changed. You can also analyze a subset of the columns in a table, for example columns used in joins, WHERE
clauses, SORT
clauses, GROUP BY
clauses, or HAVING
clauses.
Analyzing a severely bloated table can generate poor statistics if the sample contains empty pages, so it is good practice to vacuum a bloated table before analyzing it.
See the SQL Command Reference in the Greenplum Database Reference Guide for details of running the ANALYZE
command.
Refer to the Greenplum Database Management Utility Reference for details of running the analyzedb
command.
When the ANALYZE
command is run on a partitioned table, it analyzes each leaf partition, one at a time. You can run ANALYZE
on just new or changed partitioned tables to avoid analyzing partitions that have not changed.
The analyzedb
command-line utility skips unchanged partitions automatically. It also runs concurrent sessions so it can analyze several partitions concurrently. It runs five sessions by default, but the number of sessions can be set from 1 to 10 with the -p
command-line option. Each time analyzedb
runs, it saves state information for append-optimized tables and partitions in the db_analyze
directory in the coordinator data directory. The next time it runs, analyzedb
compares the current state of each table with the saved state and skips analyzing a table or partition if it is unchanged. Heap tables are always analyzed.
If GPORCA is enabled (the default), you also need to run ANALYZE
or ANALYZE ROOTPARTITION
on the root partitioned table (not a leaf partition) to refresh the root partition statistics. GPORCA requires statistics at the root level for partitioned tables. The Postgres-based planner does not use these statistics.
The time to analyze a partitioned table is similar to the time to analyze a non-partitioned table with the same data. When all the leaf partitions have statistics, performing ANALYZE ROOTPARTITION
to generate root partition statistics should be quick (a few seconds depending on the number of partitions and table columns). If some of the leaf partitions do not have statistics, then all the table data is sampled to generate root partition statistics. Sampling table data takes longer and results in lower quality root partition statistics.
The Greenplum Database server configuration parameter optimizer_analyze_root_partition affects when statistics are collected on the root partitioned table. If the parameter is on
(the default), the ROOTPARTITION
keyword is not required to collect statistics on the root partition when you run ANALYZE
. Root partition statistics are collected when you run ANALYZE
on the root partition, or when you run ANALYZE
on a leaf partition of the partitioned table and the other leaf partitions have statistics. If the parameter is off
, you must run ANALYZE ROOTPARTITION
to collect root partition statistics.
If you do not intend to run queries on partitioned tables with GPORCA (setting the server configuration parameter optimizer to off
), you can also set the server configuration parameter optimizer_analyze_root_partition
to off
to limit when ANALYZE
updates the root partition statistics.
There are several options for configuring Greenplum Database statistics collection.
The statistics target is the size of the most_common_vals
, most_common_freqs
, and histogram_bounds
arrays for an individual column. By default, the target is 25. The default target can be changed by setting a server configuration parameter and the target can be set for any column using the ALTER TABLE
command. Larger values increase the time needed to do ANALYZE
, but may improve the quality of the Postgres-based planner estimates.
Set the system default statistics target to a different value by setting the default_statistics_target
server configuration parameter. The default value is usually sufficient, and you should only raise or lower it if your tests demonstrate that query plans improve with the new target. For example, to raise the default statistics target from 100 to 150 you can use the gpconfig
utility:
gpconfig -c default_statistics_target -v 150
The statistics target for individual columns can be set with the ALTER TABLE
command. For example, some queries can be improved by increasing the target for certain columns, especially columns that have irregular distributions. You can set the target to zero for columns that never contribute to query optimization. When the target is 0, ANALYZE
ignores the column. For example, the following ALTER TABLE
command sets the statistics target for the notes
column in the emp
table to zero:
ALTER TABLE emp ALTER COLUMN notes SET STATISTICS 0;
The statistics target can be set in the range 0 to 1000, or set it to -1 to revert to using the system default statistics target.
Setting the statistics target on a parent partitioned table affects the child partitions. If you set statistics to 0 on some columns on the parent table, the statistics for the same columns are set to 0 for all children partitions. However, if you later add or exchange another child partition, the new child partition will use either the default statistics target or, in the case of an exchange, the previous statistics target. Therefore, if you add or exchange child partitions, you should set the statistics targets on the new child table.
Greenplum Database can be set to automatically run ANALYZE
on a table that either has no statistics or has changed significantly when certain operations are performed on the table. For partitioned tables, automatic statistics collection is only triggered when the operation is run directly on a leaf table, and then only the leaf table is analyzed.
Automatic statistics collection is governed by a server configuration parameter, and has three modes:
none
deactivates automatic statistics collection.on_no_stats
triggers an analyze operation for a table with no existing statistics when any of the commands CREATE TABLE AS SELECT
, INSERT
, or COPY
are run on the table by the table owner.on_change
triggers an analyze operation when any of the commands CREATE TABLE AS SELECT
, UPDATE
, DELETE
, INSERT
, or COPY
are run on the table by the table owner, and the number of rows affected exceeds the threshold defined by the gp_autostats_on_change_threshold
configuration parameter.The automatic statistics collection mode is set separately for commands that occur within a procedural language function and commands that run outside of a function:
gp_autostats_mode
configuration parameter controls automatic statistics collection behavior outside of functions and is set to on_no_stats
by default.gp_autostats_mode_in_functions
parameter controls the behavior when table operations are performed within a procedural language function and is set to none
by default.With the on_change
mode, ANALYZE
is triggered only if the number of rows affected exceeds the threshold defined by the gp_autostats_on_change_threshold
configuration parameter. The default value for this parameter is a very high value, 2147483647, which effectively deactivates automatic statistics collection; you must set the threshold to a lower number to enable it. The on_change
mode could trigger large, unexpected analyze operations that could disrupt the system, so it is not recommended to set it globally. It could be useful in a session, for example to automatically analyze a table following a load.
Setting the gp_autostats_allow_nonowner
server configuration parameter to true
also instructs Greenplum Database to trigger automatic statistics collection on a table when:
gp_autostats_mode=on_change
and the table is modified by a non-owner.gp_autostats_mode=on_no_stats
and the first user to INSERT
or COPY
into the table is a non-owner.To deactivate automatic statistics collection outside of functions, set the gp_autostats_mode
parameter to none
:
gpconfigure -c gp_autostats_mode -v none
To enable automatic statistics collection in functions for tables that have no statistics, change gp_autostats_mode_in_functions
to on_no_stats
:
gpconfigure -c gp_autostats_mode_in_functions -v on_no_stats
Set the log_autostats
system configuration parameter to on if you want to log automatic statistics collection operations.