B-tree page size when caching is considered

The recent article by Gray and Graefe in the Sigmod Record [ 1 ] included a study of B-tree page size and the trade-off between page size and the cost of accessing B-tree data. Its goal was to find the page size that would result in the lowest access cost per record. This insightful analysis showed how increasing page size permitted the B-tree to be traversed faster while increasing the amount of data that needed to be read to perform the traversal. Their analysis captures the trade-off between the cost (in time) of each access and how many accesses are needed to traverse the tree.