4. Even if we could accurately estimate the percentage of the table that is cached, what then? For example, suppose that a user issues a query which retrieves 1% of a table, and we know that 1% of that table is cached. How much of the data that the user asked for is cache? Hard to say, right? It could be none of it or all of it. The second scenario is easy to imagine - just suppose the query's been executed twice. The first scenario isn't hard to imagine either.
I have a set of slow disks which can impact performance nearly as much as in cached in memory versus the fast disks.
How practical would it be for analyze to keep a record of response times for given sections of a table as it randomly accesses them and generate some kind of a map for expected response times for the pieces of data it is analysing?
It may well discover, on it's own, that recent data (1 month old or less) has a random read response time of N, older data (1 year old) in a different section of the relation tends to have a response time of 1000N, and really old data (5 year old) tends to have a response time of 3000N.
