The TPC held a General Council meeting on December 14th 2006, in Dana Point, CA. On the OLTP front, the TPC-E benchmark is in mail ballot. The TPC-C benchmark has undergone minor revisions which have been incorporated in Version 5.8.0. With respect to decision support, review of the DS benchmark continues with working prototypes with scale factors ranging from 1 to 100 TB. Lastly, the TPC-App subcommittee is working on accommodating virtualization into the TPC-App benchmark.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee completed work on Version 5.8.0 of the TPC-C Specification.  This version is available immediately and will be effective as of February 12, 2007.  The changes in Version 5.8.0 include:

• Definition of numeric data types
• Clarification of Component Substitution
• Clean up of pointers to the TPC Pricing Specification
• Corrections of a few typographical errors

The TPC-H subcommittee did not convene at this meeting. TPC-H Version 2.6.0 is now the current revision of the specification.  TPC-H version 2.3.0 and 2.5.0 are obsolete as of 1-1-2007.  All TPC-H version 2.x results will remain publicly available. All TPC-H 2.x results are comparable and no upgrade of existing TPC-H 2.x results is necessary to remain on the current TPC-H results list.

The TPC-App subcommittee did not convene at this meeting. The TPC-App subcommittee is continuing to work on definitions for virtualization to accommodate that technology into the benchmark. A J2EE version of the application is available. This is in addition to the full TPC-App kit that is available for the .NET environment. The intent is to have links to these packages from the TPC-App web site. The packages can be obtained by contacting the TPC Administrator until such time as the web site has been updated.

The TPC-E Development Subcommittee concluded the process of reviewing and responding to all comments in October of 2006. The completed draft of the specification was sent out to mail ballot by the General Council at the December meeting. The mail ballot will conclude no later than February 12, 2007.

The TPC-DS subcommittee focused on prototyping the TPC-DS benchmark.  7 companies have working prototypes with scale factors ranging from 1 to 100 TB. In this process referential integrity and identical data generation on multiple platforms were verified.  The specification was reviewed and editorial changes were applied.  Benchmark scaling numbers for 2 to 4 processors and 100 to 300 GB scale factors were presented.  Going forward, the subcommittee will address issues around data maintenance and qualification query output comparison.  Furthermore, subcommittee members committed to providing normalized query elapsed time to assure that the query set of TPC-DS reflects today’s complex decision support queries.

The Pricing Maintenance committee is currently looking at several small enhancements to better clarify the Pricing Specification. No official updates have been made, as yet, to the 1.1 specification that was released in the second quarter of 2006. New clarifications and enhancements are expected to be integrated into either an editorial or minor version of the specification in the first or second quarter of 2007.

The Pricing Maintenance committee does not have any work items that would alter the comparability between results of current and future measurements.

The TPC completed and is reviewing the results of a market research survey to understand the level to which decision makers use benchmarks in their purchasing decisions.

The TPC will be making presentations at a number of industry conferences over the next 12 months. The TPC welcomes opportunities to present the benefits and status of TPC benchmarks. If you are interested in inviting someone from the TPC for a presentation, please contact Michael Majdalany (majdalany @ tpc.org)

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