One embodiment of the present invention provides a method for incrementally maintaining a Bernoulli sample S with sampling rate q over a multiset R in the presence of update, delete, and insert transactions. The method includes processing items inserted into R using Bernoulli sampling and augmenting S with tracking counters during this processing. Items deleted from R are processed by using the tracking counters and by removing newly deleted items from S using a calculated probability while maintaining a degree of uniformity in S.