Query optimization is an important task of Relational Database Management Systems. A typical query optimizer estimates the cost of various execution plans for a given query, and selects the one with the lowest cost. The accuracy of cost estimation is crucial in that it directly affects the quality of the decisions made by query optimizers. Seletivity estimation is an important part of cost estimation. Many commercial DBMSs maintain histograms to summarize the contents of relations in order to perform efficient selectivity estimations. In this book, we review the various existing ...