The TPC held a General Council meeting on August 11 in Portland, Oregon. The main focus of the work was on refining existing benchmarks and laying the foundation for new benchmarks. On the OLTP front, a new draft of the TPC-E specification was completed and approved for public release. With respect to decision support, the TPC-H benchmark was updated to version 2.3. Changes include higher precision for the price/performance metric as well as wording to accommodate the new processor/core/thread definitions. Development of the DS benchmark continues in the areas of queries, specification, data maintenance and prototyping. The TPC-W subcommittee worked on TPC-App Version 1.1 definition and implementation clarifications as well as changes related to the TPC Pricing specification.  The changes are effective immediately and are incorporated in the latest version of the specification, TPC-App Version 1.1.1.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee met briefly and had no urgent issues. The subcommittee will begin work on integrating the Processors/Cores/Threads wording modifications along with outstanding TAB interpretations and rulings.  These changes will be included in a future version of the TPC-C specification.

The subcommittee developed wording to enable a higher precision for the price/performance metric and how processors are reported and released revision 2.3.0 of TPC-H.  The new wording sets the price/performance precision to one cent.  For price/performance changes were applied to clauses 5 (Performance Metric and Execution Rules) and 8 (Full Disclosure).  Each of the above clauses was amended to reflect the higher price/performance precision.  For the processor changes were applied to clauses 4 (Scaling and Database Population), 6 (SUT and driver implementation), 8 (Full Disclosure Report) and Appendix E.  In each of the above clauses references to number of processors or number of CPUs were exchanged with number of nodes used/number of processors used/number of cores used and number of threads.  Publications can be published under TPC-H 2.3.0 immediately.  It will become mandatory on October 10th, 2005.

The TPC-W / TPC-App subcommittee worked on TPC-App Version 1.1 definition and implementation clarifications as well as changes related to the TPC Pricing specification.  The changes are effective immediately and are incorporated in the latest version of the specification, TPC-App Version 1.1.1 and are available on the TPC 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 $USD/SIPS), and the System Availability Date.

Some clarifications made to the TPC-App specification related to verifying the actual socket and SSL session connection rate. The homogeneity requirement regarding the queuing and messaging functions was relaxed to allow various balanced messaging and queuing product functions.  Redundancies in the Full Disclosure Report and Executive Summary reporting requirements were eliminated. Additionally, the allowed tolerances and the target percentages for Web Service Request input values now use a clearer notation. The sample Executive Summary was modified to correctly show the pricing page format as required by the TPC Pricing 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.

A preliminary rough draft version of the TPC-E benchmark is now available for the public to view on the TPC web site.

Moving forward, prototyping will continue and various changes to the runtime workload characteristics will be evaluated. In addition, the subcommittee will begin reviewing any feedback resulting from the release of the public draft.

The subcommittee is finishing its work on developing TPC-DS in the areas of queries, specification, data maintenance and prototyping.  The focus of this meeting was accepting queries, finalizing wording on Pricing and development of executive summary.  Work was also done on the FDR clause.  The benchmark contains now 95 queries.  The pricing has been brought in compliance with the current TPC pricing specification and the executive summary is finalized.  Until the next meeting the database companies will provide prototype data for the data maintenance phase and qualification output for the 1GB database.

The PR Committee continues its work on the campaign to promote the TPC and the TPC benchmarks to the industry. The prototype of a new customized information system for subscribers of TPC lists and reports continues its tests.

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