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TPC Benchmark Status
June 2004
Overview

The TPC held a General Council meeting on April 22nd in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 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 new TPC-E specification with a focus on putting in place baseline functionality. The TPC-C benchmark has updated to Version 5.3. With respect to decision support, progress continues on the new DS benchmark metrics and schema. The TPC-H and TPC-R benchmarks are addressing issues with the random number generator. As for the transactional web e-Commerce benchmark, work continues on addressing the comments that were received on the TPC-W Version 2 draft specification. Similarly, the Pricing Subcommittee continues to review and address comments submitted on the draft Pricing Specification.

 

Current Benchmarks
TPC-C

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee completed work on Version 5.3 of the TPC-C Specification. This version is effective immediately and will be required as of June 21, 2004. The changes in Version 5.3 are:

  • Wording to add a “Revised Date” to the Executive Summary to track publication revisions.
  • Updated Executive Summary sample in Appendix B to illustrate the placement of the Revised Date information.
  • Wording to support the required use of ISO Currency Codes, as specified in ISO 4217, to indicate the currency used to price the result

Results obtained with TPC-C Version 5.3 are comparable with those obtained with TPC-C Version 5.2.

 
TPC-H and R

The TPC-H/R subcommittees addressed issues with the new 64-bit data generator for scale factors larger than 10,000 Terabytes. A plan to quickly verify data sets was adopted. The data generator will be released to the public as soon as the issues are resolved, with a likely release in June 2004.

 

New Benchmarks
TPC-E (OLTP)

Over the past two months, the TPC-E subcommittee has continued its efforts in the development of a new OLTP benchmark. Code to be provided by the TPC to test sponsors continues to be developed. Recent focus has been on getting baseline functionality in place for loading the database. A new draft version of the benchmark specification has been approved. The work for the next draft of the specification is focused on clarification and refinement of the transaction profiles. Prototype benchmark kits are being developed, and the subcommittee is collecting and reviewing preliminary data.

Work moving forward will include further development of the source code to be provided by the TPC, benchmark specification development, and the collection and analysis of more prototype data.

 
TPC-DS

The TPC-DS subcommittee continued its work on developing TPC-DS in the areas of queries, data generator and schema. The current data generator was advanced to generate data in parallel. Bugs found by members were addressed and the subcommittee decided to move to weekly drops to accelerate development time.

A proposal to reduce the schema to speed up benchmark development time was made. However, the subcommittee felt that the rich schema is needed to assure that auxiliary data structures are accounted for appropriately.

Reviewing the existing query set the subcommittee increased the number of ubertemplates by 31 to a total of 53. In preparation to generate prototype data the subcommittee expanded 31 ubertemplates to 93 queries. This brings the total number of queries to 159. Contingent on solving compilation issues with dbgen, the following companies promised to deliver prototype data for all 159 queries by the next meeting in June 2004: HP, Sun, Unisys, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. The prototype data includes building a 100GB database, investigating query results and presenting normalized elapsed times for all queries.

Going forward the group is evaluating the existing queries to finalize the query set and reviewing the data maintenance functions to be able to perform full benchmark runs. This is necessary to make a final decision on the metric.

 
TPC-W

TPC-W Version 2 is currently reviewing the comments received during the public review phase. TPC-W Version 2 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 SIPS (Service Interactions Per Second), Price Performance which is, for example $/SIPS, and the system availability date.

The subcommittee received numerous comments on the TPC-W V2 draft specification. The majority of comments were of an editorial nature. Several terms and definitions used throughout the specification were clarified and their use is now consistent. Minor changes in web service interaction requirements were made to better reflect the business model portrayed. Some modifications to the schema and processing definitions were made to facilitate ease of benchmarking and auditing.

The subcommittee is reviewing suggestions to incorporate a mechanism that provides vendors the capability to publish clustered or non-clustered versions of the benchmark. Currently the benchmark only allows the use of a single application server system. Additionally the subcommittee is finalizing wording on rules regarding caching of durable data.

The subcommittee will address the remaining questions and comments received. The subcommittee expects to have all comments and issues addressed and will present the final draft specification for company vote in June 2004.

 

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. A successful press and analyst tour was staged in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Boston the week of March 29- April 2. The briefings were conducted to update editors and analysts on the progress the TPC has made over the past year.

 
Pricing

The TPC Price Subcommittee has drafted a pricing specification that can be applied to all TPC benchmarks. The specification does not substantially change what is priced, but the requirements for reporting and ordering are enhanced and strengthened, allowing improved verifiability of pricing. If approved, the pricing specification will be referenced by all existing and future TPC specifications for a consistent methodology.

The draft TPC pricing specification was made available for both public and member company review in January and February of 2004. The Price Subcommittee has been making progress in addressing the comments that were received.

 
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