384 Glossary
I/O time: The time required to complete the I/O operations for a particular transaction
or application. I/O cost is another term for I/O time.
join selectivity: A measure of the volume of matching data values between two tables
that are to be joined, based on statistical analysis of the tables. High-selectivity joins
have a high volume of potential matches, and low-selectivity joins have a low volume
of potential matches. Different access methods are useful depending on the selectiv-
ity values.
key: A generic term for a set of one or more attributes (data items) that, taken collec-
tively, allows one to identify uniquely an entity or a record in an SQL table; a super-
key.
L1 cache, L2 cache: A CPU cache is a memory directly inside the ...