Yes, there is no reason why you should not cache such a large table in the KEEP buffer pool. However, you should think carefully about how the table is accessed. I infer that this is an OLTP system. If so, you may want to consider caching the most important indexes too. You may also want to consider dropping the less important indexes, because it will probably be better to scan the table in memory than sustain I/O to uncached indexes.

I colleague of mine was asking this question. He has couple of gigs of RAM at his disposal. They want to cache an entire table (close to a gig). All the transactions are based upon this table. They have Oracle 805 on a Sun box.

You think it is a good way to do this. Any possible problems, and do people do like this. I have seen and cached small reference tables, I have no idea of anybody caching such huge tables.