APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING CLUSTERING FACTOR IN A DATABASE USING BLOCK LEVEL SAMPLING

APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING CLUSTERING FACTOR IN A DATABASE USING BLOCK LEVEL SAMPLING An apparatus and method perform block-level sampling on a database, process the data to generate one or more matrices, and process the one or more matrices to generate a clustering factor for a selected index. In addition, the apparatus and method of the preferred embodiments allow the distribution of the clustering factor to be determined across a range, there by allowing the identification of ranges where the clustering factor is high and ranges wher e the clustering factor is low. The clustering factor distribution can then be used to predict the memo ry paging performance of a search that uses an existing or a potential index that corresponds to t he sampled data, and can therefore be used to predict the performance of searching the database using an existing or potential index for a particular database query.