Oracle 11g: Extended Statistics 
(Greg Rahn) In the Real-World Performance Roundtable, Part 2: The Optimizer, Schema Statistics, SQL Tuning at Oracle OpenWorld 2006, I worked an example of how the optimizer can have difficulty estimating the correct cardinality when there is data correlation. (The Zodiac example can be found on pages 46-49 of the presentation.) In Oracle 11g, there has been some enhancements to help the optimizer deal with data correlation.
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