A unifying approach to evaluating block accesses in database organizations
A nonrecursive discrete density function to compute the probability of retrieving k records from exactly i blocks of a file is introduced here. This function is shown to be equivalent to Siler's recursive one [\textit{K. F. Siler}, Commun. ACM 19, 84-95 (1976; Zbl 0317.68034)]. Furthermore, we prove that Yao's formula [\textit{S. B. Yao}, ibid. 20, 260-261 (1977; Zbl 0346.68019)] is the expected value of our (and Siler's) probability function.
scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4080980