What are cardinality statistics?

When Derby creates statistics for a table's index, it calculates and stores in the system tables:
For example, consider the primary key on the table FlightAvailability:
CONSTRAINT FLIGHTAVAILABILITY_PK Primary Key (
      FLIGHT_ID,
      SEGMENT_NUMBER,
      FLIGHT_DATE)
For this index, Derby keeps the following information:
How does Derby use these two numbers-the number of rows in a table and the cardinality of a particular key-to determine the selectivity of a query? Take this example:
SELECT * FROM Flights, FlightAvailability
WHERE Flights.flight_id = OtherTable.flight_id
If the cardinality for flight_id in Flights is 250, then the selectivity of the predicate is 1/250. The optimizer would estimate the number of rows read to be:
((Rows in Flights) * (Rows in OtherTable))/250
Related concepts
Determinations of rows scanned from disk for a table scan
Estimations of rows scanned from disk for an index scan
Statistics-based versus hard-wired selectivity
Working with cardinality statistics