The TPC held a General Council meeting on April 21st in Las Vegas, NV. The main focus of the work was on refining existing benchmarks and laying the foundation for new benchmarks. On the OLTP front, the TPC-C specification has been revised to version 5.7. As for TPC-E, the bulk of the development work on the specification has been completed and the current version of the benchmark is under Company Review, the final stage before going to a mail ballot. With respect to decision support, the TPC-H subcommittee continued work on a fix for dbgen and qgen for scale factors of 30,000 and 100,000. Review of the DS benchmark continues although its progress has been slowed by the dbgen bugs. Finally, the TPC-App specification has been updated to version 1.2 with input processing and implementation clarifications.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee completed work on Version 5.7 of the TPC-C Specification.  This version is effective immediately and will be required as of June 20, 2006.  The changes in Version 5.7 are:

• Wording in Clause 1.3.1 to clarify the requirement of signed and unsigned numeric usage in the database.
  
• Modification of the Table Layout Diagrams in 1.3.1 to reflect the modified wording in the clause.
  
• Removal of two bullet points in Clause 1.4.9.  These bullet points dealt with the storage of date-time values and the composition of C_DATA. 
  
• Added Clause 1.4.14 which states that you must use native data types for data storage in the database.  For example, date and time must be implemented with a native data type designed to store date and time information.
  

The problems identified in the reference data set have not been completely resolved.  Currently, dbgen does not generate identical data for update data and potentially for scale factors larger than scale factor 30,000. Version 2.4.0 was approved as the next release of the TPC-H specification.  Scale factors larger than 10,000 can only be published against TPC-H version 2.4.0 or higher.

The TPC-App subcommittee worked on TPC-App Version 1.1.2 input processing clarifications, implementation clarifications, as well as review of Java and C# based reference implementations.  The majority of the changes were related to clarifications dealing with the structure and naming of the required input and output fields for the Web Service Interactions.  Additionally, clarifications were made regarding reporting requirements, which now explicitly state which values are reported for the Measurement Interval versus the Test Run. These changes are effective in 60 days and are incorporated in the latest version of the specification, TPC-App Version 1.2 which is available on the web site.

In order to encourage TPC-App results, the subcommittee has reviewed an open-source reference implementation (.NET based, written in C#) which is available for download on the TPC-App web site. Additionally, a Java based open-source implementation is being developed and is nearing completion.  The Java based reference implementation will be made available when initial development is complete. The subcommittee is also currently discussing a clarification on result categorization regarding the possibility of an implementation utilizing a virtualized environment (e.g., ESX, VMware, etc.).

Over the past two months, the TPC-E subcommittee has continued its efforts in the development of a new OLTP benchmark. Time has been spent reviewing prototype data and studying various runtime workload characteristics. Based on these studies, modifications to the workload have been made. In addition, a new draft of the specification has been approved.

The focus of this meeting was to review the specification. The subcommittee resolved minor issues in the query templates, added query variants, verified identical data generation on multiple platforms, and verified identical query output on multiple platforms.  Currently progress is stalled until dbgen bugs are resolved to correctly populate the data warehouse tables and create the update data sets.  All subcommittee members have committed to continue working on their 100,000 GB prototype setups and familiarize themselves with the workload, both with queries and data maintenance.  Providing that the dbgen bugs are fixed on time it is the subcommittee’s intention to release the specification for review after the June meeting.

Since its acceptance in February, 2005, the TPC Price Specification has included the ability to publish results on software that is not immediately orderable, but will be orderable by the committed availability date. In April, 2006, the General Council approved a minor revision to the specification that includes language to allow similar flexibility with hardware components of a Priced Configuration. The specification language includes wording to help identify which components are not currently orderable and how those components can be ordered in the future. Version 1.1.0 of the Pricing Specification is available for use immediately and will be enforced on June 20, 2006.

The Price Maintenance subcommittee also made policy recommendations to improve definitions of fair use of results where availability and orderability of products used in benchmark results are concerned. In accordance with the TPC’s Policies, such recommendations require a review by the TPC’s Steering Committee and an approval by the TPC’s General Council before they can become effective.

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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