Hi Steve,
first let me say that 'cache pinning' is not used in the usual SAP MaxDB installations. This feature has primarily been introduced for MaxDB running as liveCache installation where we wanted to ensure that some vital SQL tables would always stay in the cache.
This said, there is not much guidance I can offer for normal MaxDB installations as to which tables to pin and what size to reserve -it really depends on the individual scenario.
If you want to use table pinning, I would strongly recommend to identify tables you think would most benefit from being permanently in the data cache. This would likely be small tables (so that the pinning area can be kept small) which are frequently accessed or which you have experienced long run times you could not optimize with a index or by rewriting the SQL.
For enabling table pinning you need to first reserve space in the data cache by setting the parameter 'DataCachePinAreaThreshold'. All tables to be pinned must have the 'CACHE' attribute set (create/alter table ... cache/nocache).
If you enable the MaxDB Database Analyzer (always strongly recommended!), you can look at the data in the DBAN_CACHES.csv file to determine the table pinning effectiveness - the last 4 columns are of interest here:
1. PinPag_Acc (accesses to pinned pages)
2. PinPage_Succ (successful accesses to pinned pages)
3. PinPage_Fails (failed accesses to pinned pages)
4. PinPage_Hit (hitrate to pinned pages).
Important is that your pinned table should completely fit into the pin area.
However, tracking the effectivness becomes complicated if you pin several tables as there is no way to record the hitrate for each table individually.
Hope this helps,
Thorsten