Paul White shares some detail on a change to the Cardinality Estimator in SQL Server 2014:
The question is now how to perform a coarse estimation of the equijoin cardinality of the highlighted steps, using the information available.
The original cardinality estimator would have performed a fine-grained step-by-step histogram alignment using linear interpolation, assessed the join contribution of each step (much as we did for the minimum step value before), and summed each step contribution to acquire a full join estimate. While this procedure makes a lot of intuitive sense, practical experience was that this fine-grained approach added computational overhead and could produce results of variable quality.
The original estimator had another way to estimate join cardinality when histogram information was either not available, or heuristically assessed to be inferior. This is known as a frequency-based estimation[…]
It’s an interesting dive into one of the changes in 2014’s CE. The post is a little math-heavy but Paul does a great job keeping it interesting.