BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

IBM continues to abuse and overuse TPC-C

Tuesday Jul 25, 2006

"It's well-understood in the technical communities that TPC-C no longer represents current customer workloads since the transaction load that its models are made of are small, primitive and disconnected transactions. While this model was acceptable for the workloads of the late 1980s, it misses the mark..." Sun's World Record TPC-C Press release, August2000

This was stated when Sun was on top 6 years ago (no sour grapes!). It continued, "Customer workloads nowadays require a more ad hoc workload than the TPC-C specifies."

It is painful to see IBM over-blowing TPC-C now. IBM Press release states:

"In the TPC-C benchmark, measuring the ability of a server to process complex online transactions and large volumes of business data ... " "TPC-C benchmark is an industry standard for measuring the ability of a system to process complex online transactions and large volumes of business data."

Reality: TPC-C only does 5 light-weight transactions on 9 tables. I don't even think you can run an lemonade stand on 5 transactions and 9 tables... kinda puts things into perspective and says a lot about IBM's credibility.

The good news is that there is a new workload TPC-E that Sun and others are working to get out soon. My advice to the other vendors is to invest effort in the new and quickly toss out the old, so we can really help our customers in this modern world. Read more about TPC-E.

Required Disclosure statement

TPC-C results referenced above was the fastest overall performance world record at August 31, 2000. Sun Enterprise 10000 server (Starfire) running Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), 156,873.03 transactions per minute (tpmC), $48.81 price/tpmC, available February 28, 2001. A full disclosure report and executive summary are available through the TPC Web site located at www.tpc.org.

[1] Comments
Like this post? del.icio.us | furl | slashdot | technorati | digg
Posted at 10:50AM Jul 25, 2006 in IBM Follies
Tags:
Comments:

TPC-C, wasn't that created during the Johnson administration :) No seriously it was 1992, CD's for the first time outsold cassettes, Lawrence Welk was still alive - "Wunnerful, Wunnerful!", it was the start of text-based browsers, and it wasn't until the end of that year that CERN said the few computers on the WWW (yep, world-wide web) were reasonably reliable.

Posted by BM Seer on July 25, 2006 at 11:19 AM PDT #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.