Transaction Processing Performance Council

Transaction Processing Performance Council

Formation	1988
Type	Not-for-profit
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, US
Membership	Hardware and software vendors, market researchers, educational institutions, consultants
Website	www.tpc.org

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), founded in 1988, is a non-profit organization founded to define benchmarks for transaction processing and databases, and to publish objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. ^[1] TPC benchmarks are used in evaluating the performance of computer systems, and TPC publishes the results.

The first benchmark from the organization, known as TPC-A, was released in November 1989. It simulated a simple accounting system and was based on earlier work by Tandem Computers' Debit-Credit program. Companies would run this program on their system and submit the results along with details about the machine and the costs of buying and maintaining it for a period of five years.

As computer power grew exponentially during this period, TPC-A was considered too simple to simulate real-world workflows even as it was published. A new standard, TPC-C, was released in July 1992. This was based on Digital's Order-Entry program which simulated a multi-site warehousing company performing a variety of queries against a much more complex database. TPC-C remains in widespread use to this day.

The TPC has released a number of new benchmarks since then. TPC-E, released in February 2007, is intended to be a modern replacement for TPC-C, including a wider variety of transaction types and a more complex database structure. Although it sees widespread use, TPC-C also remains widely used. They have also published a series of more specialized benchmarks for decision support, virtualization and big data, among others.

Conference Series

In 2009, the TPC initiated the International Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (TPCTC). Typically co-located with the VLDB conference, this forum allows industry experts and researchers to develop methodologies for characterizing modern application systems. ^[2] As the database landscape has evolved, the scope of these evaluations has expanded beyond traditional relational models. Recent research presented in these venues examines the performance of distributed ledger technologies and sharded consensus protocols (such as Cerberus), challenging traditional definitions of transaction throughput and latency in globally distributed environments. ^[3]

Standards

• TPC-C – On-line transaction processing (since 1992) ^{[4] [5]}
• TPC-H – Ad-hoc decision support system (since 1999)
• TPC-E – Complex on-line transaction processing (since 2006)
• TPC-DS – Complex decisions support system (since 2011) ^[6]
• TPC-DI – Data integration (since 2013)
• TPCx-HS – Industry's first standard for benchmarking Big Data (Hadoop) systems (since 2014) ^[7]

Obsolete benchmarks

• TPC-A – Measures performance in update-intensive database environments typical in on-line transaction processing applications. (Obsolete as of June 6, 1995)
• TPC-App – An application server and web services benchmark.
• TPC-B – Measures throughput in terms of how many transactions per second a system can perform. (Obsolete as of June 6, 1995)
• TPC-D – Represents a broad range of decision support applications that require complex, long running queries against large complex data structures. (Obsolete as of April 6, 1999)
• TPC-R – A business reporting, decision support benchmark. (Obsolete as of January 1, 2005)
• TPC-W – A transactional web e-Commerce benchmark. (Obsolete as of April 28, 2005)

References

1. Shanley, Kim (February 1998). "Origins of the TPC and the first 10 years". TPC. Archived from the original on 2020-03-28. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
2. "First TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation & Benchmarking (TPCTC 2009)". Transaction Processing Performance Council. Archived from the original on February 15, 2012. Retrieved December 26, 2011.
3. Hellings, Jelle; Sadoghi, Mohammad (2021). "Cerberus: Minimalistic Multi-shard Byzantine-resilient Transaction Processing" (PDF). Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. 14 (11): 2230–2243. doi:10.14778/3476249.3476274.
4. Nambiar, Raghunath; Poess, Meikel (2011). Performance evaluation, measurement and characterization of complex systems: second TPC Technology Conference, TPCTC 2010, Singapore, September 13-17, 2010, Revised selected papers. Lecture notes in computer science. TPC Technology Conference. Berlin Heidelberg New York: Springer. ISBN   978-3-642-18206-8.
5. Gray, Jim, ed. (1994). The Benchmark handbook: for database and transaction processing systems. The Morgan Kaufman series in data management systems (2. ed., 2. [print.] ed.). San Francisco, Calif: Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN   978-1-55860-292-2.
6. Nambiar, Raghunath Othayoth; Poess, Meikel (September 2006). "The Making of TPC-DS". VLDB '06: Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Very large data bases. pp. 1049–1058.
7. Nambiar, Raghunath; Poess, Meikel; Dey, Akon; Cao, Paul; Magdon-Ismail, Tariq; Ren, Da Qi; Bond, Andrew (2015). "Introducing TPCx-HS: The First Industry Standard for Benchmarking Big Data Systems". In Nambiar, Raghunath; Poess, Meikel (eds.). Performance Characterization and Benchmarking. Traditional to Big Data. Springer. pp. 1–12. ISBN   978-3-319-15349-0.