Automatic placement of cache operations for complex in-memory dataflows

Techniques are provided for automatic placement of cache operations in a dataflow. An exemplary method obtains a graph representation of a dataflow of operations; determines a number of executions and a computational cost of the operations, and a computational cost of a caching operation to cache a dataset generated by an operation; establishes a dataflow state structure recording values for properties of the dataflow operations for a number of variations of caching various dataflow operations; determines a cache gain factor for dataflow operations as an estimated reduction in the accumulated cost of the dataflow by caching an output dataset of a given operation; determines changes in the dataflow state structure by caching an output dataset of a different operation in the dataflow; and searches the dataflow state structures to determine the output datasets to cache based on a total dataflow execution cost.