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TPC Benchmark Status
September 2002

Overview
The TPC held a General Council meeting August 8 in Toronto, Ontario. The main focus of the work was on refining existing benchmarks and laying the foundation for new benchmarks. On the OLTP front, clarifications and enhanced wording were recommended for TPC-C. With respect to decision support, several revisions were made to TPC-H to bring it to rev 1.5.0, while TPC-R saw similar enhancements leading to rev 1.4.0. Work also continues on the new DS benchmark. As for the transactional web e-Commerce benchmark, the main activity centered on re-defining the focus of the benchmark from a full e-commerce system benchmark to a commercially available application server benchmark.


TPC-C

The TPC-C maintenance subcommittee worked on refining the current benchmark. Areas of focus include cleaning up typographical errors, clarifying definitions and wording on durability tests, checkpoint interval, checkpoint duration, and durability of clusters. The subcommittee also discussed the use of Profile-Directed Optimizations as well as the redesign of the Executive Summary. These changes are expected to be incorporated into an upcoming minor revision of the TPC-C specification.

TPC-H, R and DS

Prior to the Toronto meeting, the TPC-H and TPC-R subcommittees completed revisions to clause 8.6 to allow for hardware substitutions in published benchmarks if the hardware in these benchmarks reaches End Of Life. These revisions resulted in TPC-H v1.5.0 and TPC-R v1.4.0. A proposal to reduce the 5 year maintenance requirement to 3 years was accepted and was drafted into a mail ballot.

At the Toronto meeting, the TPC-H and TPC-R subcommittees passed an intent motion to add 30 TB and 100 TB scale factors to the current specifications. Further research has to be conducted to make sure that dbgen as well as the schema support these scale factors. The group intends to add the new scale factors to the specifications at the next face-to-face meeting.

The TPC-DS development subcommittee furthered its effort to create a rich data set for TPC-DS by defining data integrity constraints as well as column correlations. It also started reviewing SQL queries submitted by member companies.

 

TPC-W

The TPC-W Subcommittee made clarifications and minor modifications to the specification relating to the primary metrics.

The Subcommittee also discussed V2 enhancements. A proposal to shift the focus from a full e-commerce system benchmark to a commercially available application transactional server benchmark was advanced. This would replace the TPC-W version 1 HTTP browser interface with a standard web services interface. In addition, common commercially available systems functions such as session management, DBMS connectivity, and authentication would be required for the web services implementation via a managed code environment such as CLR and JVM's. With this proposal the benchmark would test the performance of an application server running on one OS instance. This would result in lower benchmarking costs and would eliminate the confusion on what is being benchmarked.

The TPC-W Subcommittee is gathering feedback from the industry regarding current and emerging eBusiness technologies, features, and components. This feedback provides valuable guidance about what is appropriate for inclusion in an industry standard eBusiness benchmark. The Subcommittee intends to use the feedback to develop or enhance TPC eBusiness benchmarks with a common set of vendor neutral features. Please take the opportunity to give us your feedback by filling out the TPC-W questionnaire.

 

Public Relations Committee

The TPC web site now features result tables that can be sorted by the column header, i.e., a click at the top of a column will result in a table that is sorted by that column heading.

At the occasion of his retirement, the TPC honored Tom Sawyer, one of the founders of the TPC and its first auditor. In appreciation for his outstanding service to the TPC and in recognition for his dedication to the ideals and principles of the TPC, his guidance in founding the TPC and helping to develop and audit fair, practical and verifiable benchmarks, the TPC awarded Mr. Sawyer the position of Certified Auditor Emeritus.

 


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