Matthew McGiffen does the math:
I mentioned in my previous post about manually updating statistics that you can specify whether they’re updated using a full scan, or you can specify an amount of data to sample, either a percentage of the table size, or a fixed number of rows. You can also choose not to specify this, and SQL Server will decide for you whether to do a full scan, or to sample a certain amount of data.
I thought it would be interesting to look at what the sample sizes are that SQL will choose to use, depending on the amount of data in your table.
Click through for the result of Matthew’s analysis.