Techniques are described herein for prediction of an buffer pool size (BPS). Before performing BPS prediction, gathered data are used to determine whether a target workload is in a steady state. Historical utilization data gathered while the workload is in a steady state are used to predict object-specific BPS components for database objects, accessed by the target workload, that are identified for BPS analysis based on shares of the total disk I/O requests, for the workload, that are attributed to the respective objects. Preference of analysis is given to objects that are associated with larger shares of disk I/O activity. An object-specific BPS component is determined based on a coverage function that returns a percentage of the database object size (on disk) that should be available in the buffer pool for that database object. The percentage is determined using either a heuristic-based or a machine learning-based approach.