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TPC Benchmark Status
August 2006

Overview

The TPC held a General Council meeting on June 22nd in Les Clayes, France. The main focus of the work was on refining existing benchmarks and laying the foundation for new benchmarks. On the OLTP front, the TPC-E subcommittee has begun reviewing the comments on the draft benchmark. With respect to decision support, the TPC-H subcommittee resolved the dbgen and qgen issues for scale factors of 30,000 and 100,000, and TPC-H Version 2.4.0 was approved. Review of the DS benchmark continues although its progress has been slowed by the dbgen bugs.

 

Current Benchmarks

TPC-C

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee did not convene at this meeting.

At this stage the benchmark is functionally stabilized and the subcommittee has no open action items at this time.

 

TPC-H

The problems identified in the reference data set have been resolved.  In the process of creating and comparing the reference data set on multiple platforms software errors were found.  These were based on different overflow handling on 32 and 64 bit architectures.  Once the correctness issues were resolved performance problems were identified and corrected.  Consequently algorithms for generating comment data in the data generator dbgen were changed causing different data to be generated.  Extensive analysis was performed to assure that the new data has comparable performance with data from the previous dbgen to assure benchmark result comparability.  For the time between 6/22/06 and 8/21/06 dbgen Version 2.3.0 can only be used with TPC-H Version 2.3.0 to publish TPC-H benchmarks with scale factors less than 30,000.  Dbgen Version 2.4.0 can be used with TPC-H Version 2.4.0 to publish TPC-H benchmarks with all scale factors.

The General Council approved Version 2.4.0 of TPC-H.  Benchmark results can be published against Version 2.4.0 immediately. Version 2.4.0 will become mandatory 60 days from 6/22/06.

 

TPC-App

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

The subcommittee is working on changes to the definition of the term Operating System to take into account the existence of virtualization software products. The intent of the subcommittee is to consider a single system running multiple guest operating systems to be considered as a single system (not a cluster) for the purposes of this benchmark.

 

New Benchmarks

TPC-E

Over the past two months, the TPC-E subcommittee has continued its efforts in the development of a new OLTP benchmark. Draft versions of the specification and the TPC provided source code have been posted to the TPC web site.

The subcommittee has begun the process of reviewing and addressing submitted comments. As a result of this work, updated drafts of the specification and source code have been posted to the web site for further review.

 

TPC-DS

The focus of this meeting was to review the specification: synchronization between written specification and tools output.  Due to limited resources not all of the open dbgen bugs have been resolved and not all required prototyping has been conducted.  Providing that there will be little or no TPC-H business to conduct and providing that the dbgen bugs are fixed on time it is the subcommittee’s intention to enter company review at the August General Council meeting.

 

Other TPC Activities

Pricing Subcommittee

With the introduction of a minor revision (version 1.1), there are changes to the requirements for orderability of components used in the priced configuration of TPC benchmarks. The Pricing maintenance committee has reviewed these rules in relation to a recent publication and found them to be workable. The committee is working on a flow of the steps that should be followed if one wants to verify that a quoted price is available, given that some components may not be orderable.

The Pricing committee does not have other outstanding work items at this time.

 

Public Relations Committee

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 subcommittee is actively working on the 2006 PR plan.

 

All Benchmark Status Reports
 

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