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TPC Benchmark Status
May 2001

TPC Benchmark Status is published about every two months. The first and primary purpose of the newsletter is to keep interested parties informed about the content, issues, and schedule of the TPC's benchmark development efforts. The second purpose is to invite new members to join these important development efforts. We've already outlined most of the reasons for joining the TPC in another article, Why Join. To receive the status report by email, please click here.

Last Meeting
The TPC held a General Council meeting April 5, 2001 in Denver, CO.

TPC-C
The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee met in April but did not have any new business to conduct. The TPC-C Benchmark is functionally mature and no new work or changes to the Specification are planned at this time.

OLTP Working Group

This was the first meeting of the OLTP Working Group. Working Groups are informal bodies formed to incubate new proposals. As such, the information represented here does not constitute an official direction or benchmark sanctioned by the TPC.

The objective of the Working Group is to create a new OLTP, database centric benchmark to replace TPC-C. Members of the Working Group include BEA, Compaq, Dell, EMC, HP, Informix, Intel, Microsoft, SGI, Sun, Sybase, and Unisys.

Companies interested in joining the TPC to participate in the OLTP Working Group should contact the TPC Administrator at info@tpc.org. The Working Group will develop an RFP and solicit benchmark drafts and proposals from interested parties. In addition, the Working Group is interested in business models that have relatively high OLTP transaction rates, complex business logic, simple to understand business models and have relatively high requirements for security, availability and system and resource management. Currently, the business models under consideration are:
 • Manufacturing
 • Stock market
 • Travel
 • Retail
 • Shipping
 • Telco

TPC-H/R
The TPC-H/R Maintenance Subcommittee met in April but did not have any new business to conduct.

TPC-DS

The TPC-DS Working Group delivered a first draft of its new decision support benchmark specification to the Steering Committee. The document included a detailed description of the benchmark scope, the underlying query model, the data maintenance model, execution rules and a metric.

Upon recommendation by the Steering Committee, the General Council voted to turn the TPC-DS Working Group into a TPC Benchmark Development Subcommittee.


TPC-W

The TPC-W Subcommittee made clarifications and minor revisions to the specification. The General Council approved the clarifications as version 1.4.1 and the minor revisions as version 1.5. Version 1.4.1 is in effect immediately. Version 1.5 may be used immediately and becomes mandatory on June 4.

The minor changes covered several areas, including changes to several performance metric requirements, redefinition of growth calculations, and a redesign of the Executive Summary format. The Executive Summary now more clearly emphasizes the main components showcased in a TPC-W result.

The subcommittee further discussed proposed Version 2 modifications. A focus of discussion was encouraging or requiring more application server functionality. Possible additions that would add application server functionality include durable message queues and messaging. Also, some suggestions were made to align accurately the initial population of the database with the actual run time characteristics. The subcommittee is continuing work on additional Version 2 proposals, and is targeting the definition of an acceptable set of these proposals to use as the model for Version 2.

Public Relations Committee

We've received positive feedback on the new look and layout of the TPC web site. The web site continues to be updated. Of note, TPC-C results include an option to select either version 3 or version 5 results.

The TPC-C Top Ten lists have also been enhanced so that results from substantially identical systems will occupy a single position. This change allows the ten positions on each list to be held by ten distinct systems. For more information, please click here

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