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TPC Benchmark Status
December 2003

Overview

The TPC held a General Council meeting on October 16 in Austin, Texas. The main focus of the work was on refining existing benchmarks and laying the foundation for new benchmarks. On the OLTP front, work continues on the specification of a brand new OLTP benchmark with a focus in two general areas: TPC-provided source code and new/modified features of the benchmark. The TPC-C benchmark is being updated with a few definitions and clarifications. With respect to decision support, progress continues on the new DS benchmark in the areas of ACID tests and data maintenance. The TPC-H and TPC-R benchmarks have been revised to clarify a few clauses. As for the transactional web e-Commerce benchmark, development on the next version of TPC-W continues with the definition of several key elements. Work continues on prototyping data to adjust the benchmark profile.

 

Current Benchmarks

TPC-C

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee began work on Version 5.2 of the TPC-C Specification. This version will include wording to support interpretations pertaining to the definition of a third-party, the revision of component availability dates, and when line item pricing is required. In addition, TPC-C Version 5.2 will include wording to clarify pricing requirements of the specification.

The Subcommittee presented a timeline detailing the steps to be taken to finalize TPC-C Version 5.2. The target for release of Version 5.2 is December 2003.

 

TPC-H and R

The TPC-H/R subcommittees clarified Clause 3.1.4: Mechanisms used to ensure durability must be enabled and used on both the test and qualification databases. Consequently, the subcommittees reviewed other parts of the documentation where the use of mechanisms to assure ACID compliance are referenced, but found no ambiguous wording.

 

New Benchmarks

OLTP

Over the past two months, the OLTP subcommittee has been working in several areas. Code to be provided by the TPC continues to be developed and debugged. A spreadsheet based tool designed to estimate database sizes, table growths, and cardinality counts is being developed. Draft revisions of the specification continue to be developed as members of the subcommittee review existing content and develop new content. In addition, several member companies have been working on developing early prototype kits.

Work for the subcommittee moving forward will primarily focus on preliminary prototyping efforts, and continued specification development.

 

TPC-DS

The subcommittee has continued its work on developing TPC-DS in the areas of ACID tests and data maintenance wording. The ACID test in TPC-DS will reflect the workload nature of decision support. Instead of using artificial OLTP tests the ACID tests in TPC-DS utilize transactions also used during the data maintenance process. The tests are defined to assure the same ACID level properties as in TPC-H/R.

 

TPC-W

The TPC-W subcommittee continued its development of the next version of TPC-W. Version 2 is a transactional web service benchmark consisting of database interactions displaying ACID properties running against a commercial application server. The primary metrics are SIPS (Service Interactions Per Second), Price Performance which is $/SIPS, and the system availability date.

The processing requirements, database schema and population, test run requirements, and reporting requirements for the web service interactions have been defined and accepted. Steady state requirements for the test run are defined. The TPC-W subcommittee is in the prototyping phase of the web services version of the benchmark. Additionally, the ACID tests have been developed and approved. These tests demonstrate ACID compliance not only for the database system, but for the distributed transactions and message queues as well. The WS-I Basic Profile (BP1.0) Specification has been adopted as the required communication standard for all web service interactions in this benchmark.

Strict restrictions have been placed on user written/modified code regarding operations resulting in caching of data. All caching of durable data must maintain full atomicity, consistency, and isolation (ACI).

The subcommittee is reviewing prototype data to adjust the benchmark profile through December 2003. The subcommittee is focusing on auditing requirements (Clause 9). All other clauses have been defined and accepted and are being used for prototype purposes. The subcommittee is adopting additional requirements such as adhering to the WS-I basic profile (BP1.0) for web service interoperability. Benchmark draft review phase is targeted for December 2003.

 

Other TPC Activities

Public Relations Committee

The PR Committee continues its work on the campaign to promote the TPC and the TPC benchmarks to the industry. Several enhancements to the web site have been implemented with the addition of an improved advanced sorting option. In addition, the TPC intends to handle results in multiple currencies by grouping the result lists by currency.

 


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