What Ive been really looking for is a way to run SQL queries against MySQL 8.0 Inno DB without them hitting the cache.

Its tricky to validate improvements real time but I guess validating in prod is good too

Have you been able to try this with a `SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE * FROM ...` query?

If it's for local testing, you could try to cripple InnoDB as much as possible by just setting some absurdly low values, that would almost certainly mean no InnoDB caching is happening; https://gist.github.com/mattiasgeniar/87cd4a10bfcc788d81b51f...