New TPC benchmarks for decision support and web commerce

For as long as there have been DBMS's and applications that use them, there has been interest in the performance characteristics that these systems exhibit. This month's column describes some of the recent work that has taken place in TPC, the Transaction Processing Performance Council.TPC-A and TPC-B are obsolete benchmarks that you might have heard about in the past. TPC-C V3.5 is the current benchmark for OLTP systems. Introduced in 1992, it has been run on many hardware platforms and DBMS's. Indeed, the TPC web site currently lists 202 TPC-C benchmark results. Due to its maturity, TPC-C will not be discussed in this article.We've asked two very knowledgeable individuals to write this article. Meikel Poess is the chair of the TPC H and TPC-R Subcommittees and Chris Floyd is the chair of the TPC-W Subcommittee. We greatly appreciate their efforts.A wealth of information can be found at the TPC web site 1 . This information includes the benchmark specifications themselves, TPC membership information, and benchmark results.