PostgreSQL 19: The Join Stat Fix We Waited 10 Years For

For years, pg stats knew a table's name, but not its identity.

It now exposes the table's OID and attribute number, right beside

So you can join planner stats straight to the catalogs. No

Here is how it used to hurt. To get a table's OID from pg stats, you built it by hand: schema dot table, cast to regclass, then to oid. Fragile. A duplicate name, or a different search path, and your join pointed at the wrong table.

pg stats ext and pg stats ext exprs now carry tableid and

tableid is the table's OID. statistics id is the OID of the stats

So you join extended statistics by OID, not by name.

And a bonus hides in pg stats ext exprs. It now shows range type statistics: range length histogram, empty fraction, and range bounds histogram. If you use range columns, the planner's view of them is finally readable.

Before, you joined pg stats to pg class on the table name, and

Now it is one clean condition: c dot oid equals s dot tableid.

Stable, scriptable, and it will not surprise you in production.

In practice, it is a clean key. Filter pg stats by tableid, order by attnum, and you get every column statistic for one table. No quoting, and easy to run across hundreds of tables.

One thing to keep straight. tableid is the table's OID. statistics id is the stats object's OID. Not the same number. Do not join the extended views on tableid when you mean statistics id. The names are still there, for humans.

Filter pg stats by tableid. Jump to one stats object by

statistics id. Read range stats from pg stats ext exprs.

Planner statistics just went from something you describe, to