I’m a third-year CS student and over the past year I’ve been building minidbms — a database engine written from scratch in C and Python — to study buffer pool replacement policies experimentally. Current features: - slotted-page heap storage - direct pread/pwrite I/O - LRU / Clock / NoCache / OPT - trace-based telemetry replay - benchmark + sweep analysis tools - interactive cache inspector - B+ tree indexes (in progress) Some interesting results so far: - Bélády-related behavior reproduced empirically: at small pool sizes (3–8 frames), NoCache can outperform LRU. - LRU stack property verified: hit rate never decreases as memory increases. - Working-set convergence: at 32 frames all policies converge to the same hit rate with zero evictions. The Cache Inspector (last image) replays every page access step-by-step and shows the full buffer pool state after each event. Next step: empirical comparison of shared vs segregated buffer pools for index and data pages.…