A Suffix Tree Transform Technique for Substring Selectivity Estimation

Selectivity estimation has been a crucial component in query optimization in relational databases. While extensive researches have been done on this topic for the predicates of numerical data, only little work has been done for substring predicates. We propose novel suffix tree transform algorithms for this problem. Unlike previous approaches where a full suffix tree is pruned and then an estimation algorithm is employed, we transform a suffix tree into a suffix graph systematically. In our approach, nodes with similar counts are merged while structural information in the original suffix tree is preserved in a controlled manner. We present both an error-bound algorithm and a space-bound algorithm. Experimental results with real life data sets show that our algorithms have lower average relative error than that of the previous works as well as good error distribution characteristics.