TPC photo
The TPC defines transaction processing and database benchmarks and delivers trusted results to the industry
    Document Search         Member Login    
     Home
About the TPC
Benchmarks
      Newsletter
      Join the TPC
      Downloads
      Technical Articles
      TPCTC
      Performance-Pulse

TPC Benchmark Status
April 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 February 5th in Colorado Springs, Colorado. On the OLTP front, the TPC-E Maintenance Subcommittee acknowledged issues with EGen along with editorial changes and clarifications to the TPC-E benchmark, while the TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee completed work on editorial changes to the specification which resulted in version 5.10.1 of the benchmark standard. With respect to decision support, the discussions on future enhancements to the TPC-H and TPC-DS benchmarks continued. Finally, the TPC released a video with an overview of the work being done by the TPC Energy Subcommittee to measure energy efficiency.

 

Current Benchmarks
TPC-C

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee completed work on editorial changes for Version 5.10.1 of the TPC-C Specification. This version is available immediately. Version 5.10 became obsolete on April 6, 2009. Results obtained with TPC-C Version 5.10.1 are comparable with those obtained with TPC-C Version 5.10.

TPC-C Version 5.10.1 includes the following editorial changes:

  • Clause 3.4.2.9 – incorrect step reference
  • Clause 3.5 – wording clarification
  • Clause 5.6.4 – updated New-Order throughput graph
  • Clause 7.2.6.1 – updated reference to Pricing Specification
  • Clause 8.1.1.3 – reconciled Numerical Quantities wording with specification example and current publication practices  

 
TPC-H

The TPC-H Maintenance Subcommittee continued the discussion of what features can potentially be included in future versions of TPC-H. Two ideas were discussed in detail:

  1. Multi-Tiered data warehouse with front-end de-normalized data marts and normalized data warehouse in the back-end.
  2. Appliance Data Warehouse benchmark based on TPC-H or future data warehouse benchmarks.

 
TPC-E

The TPC-E Maintenance Subcommittee acknowledged four new EGen issues that have no impact on the functionality of the benchmark, and accepted six editorial changes to the TPC-E Specification related to EGen changes and clarifications required in the spec.

The issues referenced above will be addressed in a future revision of the benchmark standard. No updates to the benchmark standard have been made at this time.

 
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

The ETL benchmark committee was formed at the November 2008 meeting, and thus is at the starting stage of all activities. Task groups have been formed to work on several areas. At the February meeting, high-level issues were discussed including the scope and description of the benchmark, how to describe unambiguously the transformations, options for scaling the workload and measuring performance.

Companies interested in participating in the development of this benchmark are invited to join and encouraged to contact the committee chair or Michael Majdalany (majdalany @ tpc.org).

 

TPC-DS

The TPC-DS subcommittee is reviewing proposed changes in the specification that address trickle updates and query parameter variability.

 

Other TPC Activities
TPC Energy

The TPC Energy Subcommittee has developed methodology to add energy metrics to all the existing TPC Benchmarks. This will utilize the existing benchmarks as the workload and during the execution of the benchmarks the energy consumed by the System Under Test will be measured. The new metrics will be of the form: Watts/Performance.

The TPC-Energy Specification wording is approximately 99% complete. There remains some additional work in formatting. The TPC-Energy Subcommittee is developing code which will interface with 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 current version of the Pricing specification is Version 1.4.0 and is unchanged since November 2008. No major changes are currently anticipated.

 

Public Relations Committee

The TPC released a video that presents an overview of the energy efficiency specification being developed by the TPC Energy Subcommittee. The video has received positive coverage in several outlets, including:

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)

 

 
All Benchmark Status Reports
 

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid CSS!

©2001-2019 TPC. All rights reserved. Web-Design and Maintenance by Hotea Solutions