Concept of Selectivity

Selectivity is an attribute of queries that performs a search based on an equality condition. The selectivity of the query depends inversely on the proportion of qualifying rows. The smaller the proportion of qualifying rows among all the rows in FROM clause table objects, the more selective is the query.

For example, the following query has a search condition based on the customer_num column in the customer table:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE customer_num = 102;
Because each row in the table has a different customer number, this query is highly selective. In contrast, the following query has low selectivity:
SELECT * FROM customer WHERE state = 'CA';

Because most of the rows in the customer table are for customers in California, more than half of the rows in the table would be returned.