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TPC Benchmark Status
January 2009
Overview

Published 4 times per year, the TPC Benchmark Status Report is a digest of the activities of the TPC and its technical subcommittees.

The TPC held a General Council meeting on November 20th in Dana Point, CA. On the OLTP front, the TPC-E Maintenance Subcommittee made bug fixes to EGen along with editorial changes and clarifications to the TPC-E benchmark, resulting in Version 1.7.0, while the TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee continued work on reconciling the list of Technical Advisory Board interpretations. With respect to decision support, a discussion was initiated to explore future enhancements to the TPC-H benchmark. Finally, the TPC has formed the ETL Development Subcommittee to develop a new ETL benchmark.

 

Current Benchmarks
TPC-C

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee did not meet at the November 2008 TPC meeting. Previously, the subcommittee addressed three wording changes to the specification. The subcommittee modified the wording in Clause 3.4.2.9 to correct a reference in one of the isolation tests. The subcommittee also addressed modifying the graph in Clause 5.6.4 to better illustrate what is required to be reported in the FDR. In addition, wording is being developed for the Numerical Quantities (Clause 8.1.1.3) to ensure consistency across publications. These wording changes will be included in a future revision of the TPC-C Specification.  

 
TPC-H

The TPC-H Maintenance Subcommittee started a discussion of what features can potentially be included in future versions of TPC-H. Features under consideration include:

  • Data skew
  • Random column choice in queries
  • Modifying TPC-H to be a two-tiered data warehouse architecture
  • Adding queries to cover a more modern version of the SQL standard
  • Adding queries that touch more data
  • Adding tool generated queries
  • Modifying the current schema to allow for a more realistic content
  • Splitting columns
  • Changing the content of columns
  • Changing the runtime rules
  • Modifying the update functions
  • Allowing limited number of pre-aggregated data structures
  • Replacing fixed scale factors with finely grained not predefined scale factors
  • Injecting NULLs into the dataset
  • Mandatory loading of unmodified output of dbgen or including time to modify into load time

 
TPC-E

The TPC-E Maintenance Subcommittee resolved two bugs in EGen, and made some small changes to the EGen code. The subcommittee made some editorial changes to the TPC-E Specification and updated the specification to reflect the changes made to EGen. Some clarifications were made to the full disclosure requirements, and verification tests for some configurations were refined. A new revision of the TPC-E benchmark (v1.7.0) with these changes was approved and is available immediately, and v1.6.0 becomes obsolete as of January 19, 2009. Prior results and Version 1.7.0 results are comparable. Prior results do not need to be upgraded to Version 1.7.0 result.

 
TPC-App

The TPC-App Maintenance Subcommittee did not convene at this meeting. The subcommittee will continue to monitor the benchmarks, along with any interpretations and rulings, for discussion and possible inclusion in future versions of the specification.

 

Benchmarks Under Development
ETL

At the November meeting the TPC formed a Development Subcommittee to develop an ETL benchmark. The objective of the committee is to:

  • Provide the industry with reliable, comparable performance data based on a meaningful scenario
  • Encourage vendors to create better performing systems
  • Encourage disclosure of methods used to obtain performance (customers should be able to replicate vendor results)
  • Expand the market through increased credibility of ETL tools through an industry organization which can set ground rules and a recognized system of measurements

 

Other TPC Activities
TPC Energy

The TPC Energy Subcommittee is developing methodology to add energy metrics to all the existing TPC Benchmarks. This will utilize the existing TPC benchmarks as the workload and during the running of the benchmarks, measure the energy being consumed by the System Under Test. The new metrics will be of the form: Watts/Performance.

The TPC Energy Specification wording is approximately 80% complete. There remains additional work in reporting requirements and auditing procedures. The TPC-Energy subcommittee is developing code which will interface to the power analyzers and temperature probes. This code will collect the energy and temperature data of the components of the System Under Test and create a uniform log for reporting the results. The TPC will use the SPEC consortium Power and Temperature Daemon code as part of this benchmark. These programs will be available to Test Sponsors who will run the TPC-Energy option of the TPC Benchmarks.

 
Pricing Specification

The Pricing Maintenance Subcommittee has developed language to clarify areas of the specification regarding orderability, availability, maintenance requirements and Full Disclosure revision requirements. These changes were approved by the TPC. None of the changes affect the comparability of existing benchmark results. The new version of the Pricing Specification is Version 1.4.0. It is available immediately and obsoleted Version 1.3.0 on January 19, 2009.

 

Public Relations Committee

The TPC continued its analyst and press briefings with follow on interviews on the progress of the TPC benchmarks.

We welcome 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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