TPC photo
The TPC defines transaction processing and database benchmarks and delivers trusted results to the industry
    Document Search         Member Login    
     Home
About the TPC
Benchmarks
      Newsletter
      Join the TPC
      Downloads
      Technical Articles
      TPCTC
      Performance-Pulse

Benchmark Status
April 2000

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
TPC held a General Council meeting on April 12th in Palo Alto, California.

TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee:
TPC-C Version 4.0 is in mail ballot. The member companies of the TPCare voting whether to accept this new version as an official benchmark.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee accepted the following goals to guide the development:

  • Recalibrate the benchmark:
    • Increase transaction CPU requirements by a factor of 10.
    • Reduce transation disk I/O requirements by a factor of 2.
    • Move the read to write ratio to approximately 80:20.
  • Grow the benchmark:
    • Add new features that are representative of today's OLTP environment.
    • Add and/or adjust metrics to improve the relevance of benchmark results.
  • Retain existing benchmark strengths
Highlights of the new features and changes approved by the subcommittee are briefly described below and are discussed in greater detail in the V4 White Paper.

New Features of TPC-C Version 4.0

  • Referential Integrity of Primary/Foreign Key relationships.
  • Data protection requirement (i.e. RAID).
  • Non-Uniform data access patterns using a Time Varying Random (TVRand) function to create hot spots.
  • Longer measurement interval to demonstrate stability in performance.
  • New methodology to demonstrate "steady-state" using moving averages.
  • New high-frequency transaction that increases DBMS cache hits.
  • Stringent transaction response times.
  • Increased transactional complexities for every transaction.
  • Increase the inter-warehouse dependency.
  • An increase in the relationship between New-Orders and Customer payments.
  • Maintenance pricing for 24 hours X 7 days.
  • Change of the pricing requirement from 5 years to 3 years.
TPC-D Subcommittee
The Decision Support Working Group is tasked with developing a benchmark specification for the data warehousing market that will replace the current specifications, TPC-R and TPC-H. The main challenge is to develop a workload and environment that accurately reflect the constraints of large-scale decision support systems. These include:

  • many users, submitting both ad-hoc (i.e. unknown in advance) and "canned" queries.
  • use of front-end tools that generate very complex SQL queries.
  • a large "snowflake" schema consisting of multiple fact tables that share some dimensions.
  • data refresh activity that must be carried out on a regular basis.
  • partial database reloads/recalculation of aggregates.
  • extracts and dumps to data mining and analysis tools.
The working group hopes to submit a draft benchmark specification to the TPC for refinement and prototyping, with the goal to have a new DS benchmark standard finalized by late 2001.

All Benchmark Status Reports
 

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid CSS!