Transaction Processing Performance Council Launches New Benchmark for Measuring On-Line Transaction Processing System Performance

Business Wire, March 19, 2007

TPC-E sets new standard for measuring the performance and price/performance of OLTP hardware and software configurations

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) today announced the immediate availability of the TPC Benchmark[TM] E (TPC-E). The TPC-E benchmark is the much-anticipated successor to TPC-C, the popular yardstick for comparing On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) performance on various hardware and software configurations. TPC-E defines a sophisticated workload representative of real-world OLTP applications.

The benefits of TPC-E include:

* A familiar business model that is easy to understand

* A balanced mixture of disk input/output and processor usage

* A sophisticated database schema that reflects the complexity found in modern applications

* A workload which is representative of a broad segment of real-world OLTP systems

"TPC-E has been designed to reflect the technology and transaction complexity that we're seeing in our customers' application environments," said George Wang, vice president of systems performance, IBM. "We look forward to including TPC-E as a significant component in our systems performance portfolio."

The TPC-E benchmark models a brokerage firm with customers who generate transactions related to trades, account inquiries and market research. The brokerage firm in turn interacts with financial markets to execute orders on behalf of the customers and updates relevant account information.

The TPC-E benchmark is scalable; the number of customers defined for the brokerage firm can be varied to represent the workloads of different size businesses. The benchmark consists of ten kinds of business transactions which are executed in a specific mix. The TPC-E metrics are "tpsE" (transactions per second E) and "$/tpsE." The performance metric, tpsE, is the number of trade-result transactions the server can sustain over a period of time. The price-performance metric, $/tpsE, is the total system cost for hardware, software, and maintenance, divided by the performance.

"TPC-E dramatically expands and improves on the industry's ability to objectively measure and compare the price and performance of various OLTP systems," said Michael Molloy, senior manager at Dell Corporation and chairman of the TPC. "TPC-E is the result of years of development to produce a balanced, relevant, modern OLTP benchmark which is a worthy successor to TPC-C."

About the TPC

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. The TPC was established in August 1988 by eight leading software and hardware companies. The TPC currently has 18 full members: AMD, Bull, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, Hitachi, IBM, INGRES, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Netezza, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Teradata and Unisys.

About the TPC Benchmarks

In addition to TPC-E, the TPC has three other active benchmarks:

* TPC-C: Online transaction processing

* TPC-H: Decision support for ad hoc queries

* TPC-App: Business-to-business transactional Web services workload

Benchmark results and further information can be accessed via the TPC home page at www.tpc.org.