Analysing Costs

We (pessimistically) assume that there is no effective caching of pages read from the database.

That is, accessing n object vectors (chosen at random) is going to result in n page reads.

This gives an upper-bound on the actual cost; we discuss possible amelioration of this via clustering and caching later.

On the other hand, we also assume that if the access to the vectors is via a sequential scan, then each page in the database file will be read exactly once.