A method of estimating cardinality of a join of tables using multi-column density values and additionally using coarser density values of a subset of the multi-column density attributes. In one embodiment, the subset of attributes for the coarser densities is a prefix of the set of multi-column density attributes. A number of tuples from each table that participate in the join may be estimated using densities of the subsets. The cardinality of the join can be estimated using the multi-column density for each table and the estimated number of tuples that participate in the join from each table.