In this example, the end-users are trained to input only the first three characters of a name. Because of this, when calculating selectivity for the CUSTOMER table we should use the most common 3 character string found in the LastName and FirstName columns. In this example, “SMI%” is the most occurring first three characters of the LASTNAME. Note, this data should not be assumed, but rather calculated from the data and in our case there were a lot of Smiths.