A method, medium, and system to generate cardinality estimates for at least one query execution plan for a query by representing a given set of multidimensional data including a plurality of data points having a value by a hierarchical tree data structure including nodes, each node representing a distribution of a subset of the points in the data set and being partitioned into tiles; calculating a bounding rectangle of the data points in each node; entering all non-empty tiles into a queue; processing of the queue can continue until a computational memory space limit is reached or until a desired estimation resolution is met; and encoding the resulting tree structure.