Modern disks often have their own main memory caches, typically about 1 MB, and use this to prefetch pages. The rationale for this technique is the empirical observation that, if a disk page is requested by some (not necessarily database!) application, 80% of the time the next page is requested as well. So the disk gambles by reading ahead.
1. Give a nontechnical reason that a DBMS may not want to rely on prefetching controlled by the disk.
2. Explain the impact on the disk's cache of several queries running concurrently, each scanning a different file.
3. Is this problem addressed by the DBMS buffer manager prefetching pages? Explain.
4. Modern disks support segmented caches, with about four to six segments, each of which is used to cache pages from a different file. Does this technique help, with respect to the preceding problem? Given this technique, does it matter whether the DBMS buffer manager also does prefetching?