The TPC held a General Council meeting on April 21st in Denver, CO. The main focus of the work was on refining existing benchmarks and laying the foundation for new benchmarks. Several of the committees (TPC-C, TPC-H) began incorporating the Pricing Specification requirements into their benchmarks. On the OLTP front, the TPC-E specification continues its forward progress with work on initial database sizing, scale factor, runtime I/O characteristics, and isolation levels. With respect to decision support, development of the DS benchmark continues in the areas of queries, specification, data maintenance and prototyping. As for the transactional web e-Commerce benchmark, TPC-App 1.1 was brought forward with clarifications as well as changes related to the TPC Pricing specification. The Pricing Specification was reviewed for editorial cleanup. A new working group was formed to define how CPUs are counted and reported in light of multi-core, multi-threaded processors.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee completed work on Version 5.4 of the TPC-C Specification. This version is effective immediately and will be required as of June 20, 2005. The changes in Version 5.4 are:

• Integration of the TPC Pricing Specification
• Wording to clarify the menu response time in Clause 5.3.3
• Wording to clarify the checkpoint requirement for the durability tests as outlined in Clause 3.3.3.2

Results obtained with TPC-C Version 5.4 are comparable with those obtained with TPC-C Version 5.3

The subcommittee discussed incorporation of the Pricing Specification into the specification.

Over the past month, the TPC-E subcommittee has continued its efforts in the development of a new OLTP benchmark. During this time a new draft of the specification has been approved. In addition, a new version of the TPC provided code has been released to subcommittee members.

Prototyping work continues. Techniques for setting runtime I/O characteristics were evaluated. Further development continues to enhance and refine these techniques. Initial tests have been developed to verify compliance with established isolation level requirements, and further development of additional tests to verify compliance continues.

Moving forward, prototyping will continue and various changes to the runtime workload characteristics will be evaluated.

The subcommittee has closed the submission of new queries.  At this meeting the subcommittee finished developing the remaining query templates and variants, for a total of 135.   The subcommittee identified changes arising from the metric and execution rules that need to be applied to the FDR clause.  Since the last face-to-face meeting the metric and execution rules were finalized.  These rules are not materially different from the interim metric and execution rules.  Each performance run consists of two multi-user runs and one data maintenance run.  The metric measures queries per hour taking the following timing intervals into consideration: load time, update time and query times.  After thoroughly analyzing the metric the subcommittee showed that this metric is both easy to understand and solid. 

Until the next meeting open areas of the specification will be finished and editorial work will be carried out.  More prototype data will be gathered to demonstrate the impact of running all queries in the presence of data maintenance operations on software and hardware.  Especially, prototype data for each query will be gathered to decide on the final set of queries.

The TPC-W / TPC-App subcommittee worked on TPC-App Version 1.0 definition and implementation clarifications as well as changes related to the TPC Pricing specification.  The changes are incorporated in the latest version of the specification, TPC-App Version 1.1. and are available on the web site.

TPC-App is a web service benchmark consisting of transactions involving database interactions, durable message queue operations, and displaying ACID properties running against a commercial application server. The primary metrics are Total SIPS (Service Interactions Per Second), SIPS per Application Server, Price Performance (for example $/SIPS), and the System Availability Date.

Some clarifications made to the TPC-App specification related to further defining terms related to caching, and permissible caching methods. Definitions for the ‘Transaction’ terms were clarified and are now used throughout the specification consistently. Additional clarifications were made relating to allowable messaging products. 

Changes related to the Application Program include the addition of a permissible ‘volume’ field based on the I_DIMENSION field, extraneous fields from the ICE and PGE log were removed, and an additional verification of consistency between the shipping queue and DBMS was added. Additionally, the structure of the Shipping Cost Matrix has been redefined to allow varying implementation models.

The TPC-App specification was also modified to reference the TPC Pricing specification Version 1.0 where appropriate.  Clause 7 of TPC-App version 1.1 now focuses primarily on TPC-App specific pricing requirements.

The PR Committee continues its work on the campaign to promote the TPC and the TPC benchmarks to the industry. A media and analyst tour is being prepared to showcase the newly released benchmarks.

Presentations for TPC speakers have been prepared, reviewed, and are in final draft. The prototype of a new customized information system for subscribers of TPC lists and reports continues its tests.

The TPC approved the TPC Pricing Specification Version 1.0.0 in February 2005. To date, the TPC-C and TPC-App benchmarks have revisions that include recognition of the Pricing Specification. The TPC Pricing Specification becomes effective on or before August 31, 2005 for all TPC benchmarks.

Since February, the Pricing Maintenance Committee has examined the specification for minor editorial clean-up with the anticipation of releasing an editorial update later this year. Note that all benchmark results that are currently valid under existing specifications will continue to be valid under the new pricing rules.

At the February meeting, the TPC formed a working group to define how CPUs are counted and reported in light of multi-core, multi-threaded processors.

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