1. A method for transformation rule profiling for a query optimizer, comprising: obtaining a database query configured to be optimized by the query optimizer of a database system; finding an optimized query plan for the database query using a host set of transformation rules; removing individual transformation rules from a query plan generation, wherein one transformation rule is removed and checked at a time; generating a test query plan after one transformation rule has been removed; determining whether the test query plan is different than the optimized query plan in the absence of the removed transformation rule; defining a relevance ratio for a transformation rule as a fraction of the total generated test query plans for which the transformation rule is relevant; creating an equivalent set of transformation rules that includes transformation rules whose relevance ratio exceeds a relevance threshold where the test query plan generated from the equivalent set of transformation rules is equivalent to the optimized plan.