Published about 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 meetings on August 24th in Dreieich Germany, and November 8th in Burlingame, California. The TPC-VMS specification was approved as a benchmark standard. The TPC welcomed back the TPC-DI (formerly ETL) benchmark development. The TPC’s fourth Technology Conference, TPCTC 2012, was held in conjunction with the annual conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), in Istanbul, Turkey.

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee had no outstanding issues to discuss. The subcommittee continues 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-DS Maintenance Subcommittee worked on refining the TPC-DS specification, correcting minor errors, and making editorial changes which will be brought forward in an upcoming revision.

The TPC-E Maintenance Subcommittee has made some minor enhancements to the EGen code to improve platform support, made some editorial changes to the specification, and is reviewing and extending the development of the unit test framework for EGen.

The TPC-H Maintenance Subcommittee had no outstanding issues to discuss. The subcommittee continues to monitor the benchmark, along with any TAB interpretations and rulings, for discussion and possible inclusion in future versions of the TPC-H specification.

The TPC approved by mail ballot version 1.0.0 of the TPC-VMS Benchmark specification. TPC-VMS specifies the rules and methodology for measuring and reporting TPC-C, TPC-E, TPC-H and TPC-DS metrics running in a Virtualized Environment.

Data Integration (DI), also known as ‘ETL’, is the analysis, combination, and transformation of data from a variety of sources and formats into a unified data model representation. Data Integration is a key element of data warehousing, application integration, and business analytics solutions. The variety and volume of data is always increasing and performance of data integration systems is critical. However, there has been no industry standard for measuring and comparing the performance of DI systems.

The TPC has re-established the TPC-ETL subcommittee, renamed to TPC-DI to develop a DI benchmark. The TPC-DI benchmark subcommittee has been formed and is continuing the development of the specification and data generator. Two sample implementations have been created and initial runs performed.

The TPC-V development subcommittee has been making progress in developing an end-to-end reference benchmarking kit, which can now run transactions on multiple databases in multiple VMs on a virtualized server. A new draft version of the specification has been approved.

The TPC Energy subcommittee updated the EMSC code to version 1.5.0 while the TPC-Energy specification is now revision 1.50.

The current TPC Price Specification is Version 1.7.0 which includes minor enhancements to recognize use of storage devices other than rotating disks and to recognize that pricing rules apply to results that are in an active state on the TPC results list. All prior active results are considered to be comparable to those published under revision 1.7.

The TPC had a very successful TPCTC 2012 conference in conjunction with VLDB2012 in Istanbul, Turkey. The proceedings of the workshop will be available at the end of 2012.

The TPC has approved the 2013 edition in conjunction with VLDB2013 and issued a call for papers for the workshop which will be held on August 26, 2013. With this conference, the fifth in the series, the TPC encourages researchers and industry experts to submit novel ideas and methodologies in performance evaluation, measurement, and characterization. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Big Data Appliances
• Cloud Computing
• In-memory databases
• Social media infrastructure
• Business intelligence
• Complex event processing
• Database optimizations
• Green computing
• Disaster tolerance and recovery
• Energy and space efficiency
• Hardware innovations
• Data Integration
• Hybrid workloads
• Virtualization
• Lessons learned in practice using TPC workloads
• Enhancements to TPC workloads

Abstracts are due on June 8 and papers on June 15, 2013.

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