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 September 17th in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On the OLTP front, the TPC-E Maintenance Subcommittee made editorial changes to the specification along with updates to EGen, resulting in Version 1.9.0. With respect to decision support, the TPC-H made minor changes to clarify data redundancy and resolved numerous editorial issues in the specification, resulting in Version 2.9.0. The Energy Subcommittee completed the specification to add energy metrics to the existing TPC benchmarks, and Version 1.0.0 is now in mail ballot. Finally, the TPC held a very successful workshop, the TPC TC 2009 Technology conference in Lyon, France, in conjunction with VLDB 2009.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee had no outstanding issues to discuss at the September 2009 meeting. The subcommittee will continue to monitor the benchmark, along with any TAB interpretations and rulings, for discussion and possible inclusion in future versions of the TPC-C specification.

The TPC-H Maintenance Subcommittee made minor changes to the TPC-H specification to clarify data redundancy and resolved numerous editorial issues in the specification. A new revision of the TPC-H benchmark (v2.9.0) with these changes was approved and is available immediately, and v2.8.0 becomes obsolete in 60 days. Prior results and Version 2.9.0 results are comparable. Prior results do not need to be upgraded to Version 2.9.0 results.

The TPC-H Maintenance Subcommittee is considering adding scale factors 300,000 and 1,000,000 to the specification and has begun technical research necessary to update the specification and tool set.

The TPC-E Maintenance Subcommittee made some editorial changes to the TPC-E Specification related to 60-day space requirements. A new revision of the TPC-E benchmark (v1.9.0) with these changes was approved and is available immediately, and v1.8.0 becomes obsolete as of November 16, 2009. Prior results and Version 1.9.0 results are comparable. Prior results do not need to be upgraded to Version 1.9.0 results.

The ETL benchmark committee has accepted a draft description of the schemas and transformations that will comprise the workload. The primary focus now is on what metrics to report and how to scale the workload.

Companies interested in participating in the development of this benchmark are invited to join and encouraged to contact the TPC Administrator.

The TPC held a workshop on August, in conjunction with the 35th international conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2009), at the Convention Center in Lyon, France. The workshop was a big success, drawing up to 50 participants, with 18 papers from 50 authors presented. Topics focused on how to improve benchmarks and proposals were brought forward for possible future benchmarks. The proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

The TPC Energy sub-committee has completed the specification which adds 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 complete. The TPC required code for collecting energy consumption is 100% complete. The TPC-Energy subcommittee has developed code which will interface to the power analyzers and temperature probes. This code collects the energy and temperature data of the components of the System Under Test and creates 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 to run the TPC-Energy option of the TPC Benchmarks.

The TPC-Energy Specification has now gone to Mail Ballot for approval.

Version 1.5.0 of the Pricing Specification is currently required for all TPC benchmarks. The Price Maintenance Committee has not identified any additional changes needed for future versions of the specification.

In addition to the TPC TC2009 Technology Conference activities described above, the TPC issued a press release reprimanding one of its members following the publication of an ad.

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 the TPC administrator Michael Majdalany (majdalany @ tpc.org)

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