We use the LINEITEM relation from the TPC-H benchmark at scale factor 0.1 lORDERKEY : 1 lPARTKEY : 15519 lSUPPKEY : 785 lLINENUMBER : 1 lQUANTITY : 17 lEXTENDEDPRICE : 24386.67 lDISCOUNT : 0.04 lTAX : 0.02 lRETURNFLAG : N lLINESTATUS : O lSHIPDATE : 1996-03-13 lCOMMITDATE : 1996-02-12 lRECEIPTDATE : 1996-03-22 lSHIPINSTRUCT : DELIVER IN PERSON lSHIPMODE : TRUCK lCOMMENT : blithely regular ideas caj query LINEITEM feedproject[lORDERKEY, lPARTKEY, lSUPPKEY, lLINENUMBER, lQUANTITY, lEXTENDEDPRICE, lDISCOUNT, lTAX, lRETURNFLAG, lLINESTATUS, lSHIPDATE] count 13.86, 13.66, 13.61 sec Estimate 16.76 query LINEITEM feedproject[lORDERKEY] count 2.95, 2.96, 2.95 Estimate 5.95 Time difference is 13.66 - 2.96 = 10.7 Time per attribute is 10700 / (10 * 600572) ms = 0.0018 let LINEITEMFirstAttr = LINEITEM feedproject[lORDERKEY] consume query LINEITEMFirstAttr feedproject[lORDERKEY] count 2.32, 2.32, 2.32 Estimate 2.39 let LINEITEM10 = LINEITEM feed ten feed product remove[no] consume let LINEITEMFirstAttr10 = LINEITEMFirstAttr feed ten feed product remove[no] consume query LINEITEM10 feedproject[lORDERKEY] count 57.22, 60.26, 58.39 Estimate 59.5 Tuplesize is 169.8 query LINEITEMFirstAttr10 feedproject[lORDERKEY] count 25.70, 22.70, 22.88 Estimate is 23.9 Tuplesize is 5 Time difference is 58.5 - 22.8 = 35.7 Difference in number of bytes is 164.8 * 6005720 Time per byte is 35700 / (164.8 * 6005720) = 0.036 mikrosecs = 0.000036 ms per byte For this query: query LINEITEMFirstAttr10 feedproject[lORDERKEY] count total time for bytes is 6005720 * 0.000036 = 0.216 sec total time for attrs is 6005720 * 1 * 0.0018 = 10.81 sec Remaining time is 22.8 - 11 = 11.8 sec is 11800 / 6005720 = 0.002 ms per tuple Estimates for small relations are a bit too large because time per byte is measured for reading large relations from disk (not buffered).