Hi, folks, I'm currently doing a study about RUNSTATS at DB2 v8.2 on Linux Redhat

I kinda wonder about the WITH DISTRIBUTION option that RUNSTATS had, which supposed to show us the number of occurences of a value (for the F part), but when I check the value's number of occurences with :
SELECT column,COUNT(column) FROM table GROUP BY column

It has a totally different value from the one at the SYSCAT.COLDIST has, for example :

COLVALUE : 66
VALCOUNT : 827

When I check using the above mentioned SQL statement, the value 66 only has 437 duplicates.

I wonder, if number of occurences and duplicates has different meaning ?

And also, about LIKE STATISTICS, when I saw the manual it supposed to update SUB_COUNT and SUB_DELIM_LENGTH columns in the SYSIBM.SYSCOLUMNS table, right ? I've done the RUNSTATS ... LIKE STATISTICS against a string-typed column, but as the result, those columns' value doesn't change at all. Does anyone has any clue ??

Not sure whether that's what DB2 8.2 for LUW provides, but the term "distribution statistics" normally refers to ranges, or bins, of values rather than individual value counts.

For columns with just a limited number of discrete values, the value count statistics ("basic statistics") are just fine. But for numeric and essentially continuous datatypes (like REAL, FLOAT, DECFLOAT, DECIMAL, or even INT), columns will tend to have lots of different values with almost none of them being equal. In those cases, knowing how many values fall between (say) 0 and 1, 1 and 2, 2 and 3, ... is more informative to the optimizer than knowing that (say) 1.5437 and 2.7345 are the only two values occurring more than once.

The boundary values (in my example: 0, 1, 2, 3) set up so called "bins", or quantiles, for which histogram (distribution) statistics can be computed given the full (or sampled) data.