Although many techniques provide ways to answer queries very quickly by either avoiding joins and/or aggregation or avoiding expression computations in order to apply filtering predicates, these techniques have significant potential overhead for maintenance, and require a great deal of storage space. The present invention discloses the use of synopsis or zone tables to expressions to provide powerful filtering capabilities to base tables across joins, and aggregations on join results, thus allowing for highly effective region or stride filtering and ordering aggregate ranges to select the most likely candidate tuples for joining to produce top-N or bottom-N result sets for queries.