The TPC held a General Council meeting on October 20th, in Nashville, Tennessee.  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 latest draft of the TPC-E specification.  Preliminary prototype data was also reviewed.  Version 5.5 of the TPC-C specification was completed and approved.  With respect to decision support, the TPC-H subcommittee corrected a bug in dbgen to make it compliant with the specification.  Development of the DS benchmark continues with a nearly completed draft of the specification and closure on most of the open issues.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee completed work on Version 5.5 of the TPC-C Specification.  This version is effective immediately and will be required as of December 19, 2005.  The changes in Version 5.5 are:

• Wording in Clause 8.1.9.1 to address a TAB interpretation regarding the auditor’s opinion of a result’s compliance
• Wording changes to incorporate the reporting of processors, cores, and processor threads in the Full Disclosure Report.  The changes are in Clauses 8.1.1.2, 8.1.1.7, and 9.2.9

It was brought to the subcommittee’s attention that the current database generator for TPC-H produces data that is not compliant with the specification.  These errors cause the qualification database to contain wrong rows.  Additionally, the errors cause the test database to be inconsistent (referential integrity violation).  Bugs are being worked on and a new, working version of dbgen will be posted on the web site.

The TPC-W / TPC-App subcommittee did not convene at this meeting.

Over the past two months, the TPC-E subcommittee has continued its efforts in the development of a new OLTP benchmark.  During this time the latest draft of the specification was approved and released for public review.  In addition, a new version of the TPC provided code has been released to subcommittee members.  The subcommittee has also spent time reviewing preliminary prototype data.

The focus of this meeting was to review the specification and to close most of the open issues.  All sections, except for the audit rule section are finished and ready for auditor review.  Before company review, the specification will also be reviewed by an editor to clean up references and formatting.  Queries and tools are ready for running the query part of the benchmark.  The Data Maintenance process is defined but implementation by database vendors needs to be finished.  All member companies are highly encouraged to run the benchmark from the beginning to end before going to company review.

The TPC approved the TPC Pricing Specification Version 1.0.1 in June 2005.  No significant changes have been requested to the current version of the specification and the Pricing Maintenance Committee has not needed to meet in the interim.  As requirements for clarification arise, the committee will meet to enhance the current specification.  We continue to be open to requests for change, should a member company initiate such a request.

The use of the Pricing Specification is currently required for all active TPC benchmarks.

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.  The PR Committee is also implementing the new methodology for how CPUs are counted on the TPC web site (see the August 2005 BSR for further information).

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