TPC-E

TPC-E
Name	TPC-E
Developer	Transaction Processing Performance Council
Status	Active
Genre	Database benchmark
Website	https://www.tpc.org/tpce/

TPC-E. It is a standardized, online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council to measure the performance and price-performance of server systems processing transactions for a brokerage firm. The benchmark simulates the workload of a financial services company, providing a complex and realistic model for evaluating database management systems and server hardware. It succeeded the earlier TPC-C benchmark, offering a more modern and application-driven workload reflective of contemporary business environments.

Overview

The Transaction Processing Performance Council, a non-profit corporation founded by industry leaders like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle Corporation, created TPC-E to address the evolving demands of OLTP systems. It was designed to be more representative of modern, complex applications than its predecessor, incorporating a sophisticated data model and a mix of read-and-write transactions. The benchmark's specification is publicly available, ensuring transparency and fostering competition among technology vendors such as Dell, Intel, and Cisco Systems. Its results are rigorously audited, providing a trusted metric for comparing system capabilities in enterprise computing environments.

Benchmark Specifications

The TPC-E benchmark specification defines a complete, auditable framework for testing. It models a brokerage firm with customers who interact with the market through transactions like trades and account inquiries. The underlying database schema is complex, involving numerous tables with relationships that simulate a real financial application. Key components include the broker, customer, and market data tables, which must be scaled according to the number of measured customers. The specification mandates ACID (Atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) properties for all transactions and requires a detailed disclosure report, including the total system cost, which is used to calculate the price-performance metric. Governing documents are maintained by the Transaction Processing Performance Council and are subject to periodic review.

Workload and Transactions

The workload consists of a series of transactional procedures that simulate the activities of customers, brokers, and market systems. There are ten primary transaction types, including Trade-Order, Trade-Result, and Market-Feed, which mimic real-world operations on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. These transactions involve a mixture of complex queries and updates, stressing the database management system's ability to handle concurrency, referential integrity, and locking (computer science). The workload is driven by a remote terminal emulator that simulates thousands of concurrent users, creating a demanding environment that tests CPU processing, I/O subsystem performance, and overall system throughput measured in transactions per second (tpsE).

Implementation and Hardware

Implementing TPC-E requires significant hardware and software resources. Vendors like HPE, Lenovo, and Fujitsu often use high-end servers equipped with multiple Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC processors and large amounts of RAM. The storage subsystem typically involves high-performance solid-state drives or storage area network configurations from companies like NetApp or Pure Storage. The benchmark can be run on various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows Server and Linux distributions, and supports major database platforms from Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and IBM Db2. The configuration must be fully documented, including all networking equipment from vendors such as Juniper Networks.

Performance Metrics and Results

The primary performance metric is tpsE, representing the number of Trade-Result transactions the system can sustain per second while executing the full suite of transactions. A critical secondary metric is the price-performance, expressed as dollars per tpsE ($/tpsE), which incorporates the total cost of the hardware and software over a three-year period. Results are published with extensive detail on the Transaction Processing Performance Council website, showing top-performing systems from companies like Dell EMC and Hitachi. These results are often showcased at major industry events like the International Supercomputing Conference and influence purchasing decisions for data centers supporting financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase.

Industry Adoption and Significance

TPC-E has been widely adopted as a key industry standard for evaluating OLTP performance. Its realistic workload makes it a valuable tool for organizations like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs to gauge system capabilities before deployment. The benchmark has driven innovation in server and database technology, pushing vendors to optimize for complex transactional workloads. While other benchmarks like SPECint measure raw compute power, TPC-E's holistic approach to measuring a complete business system ensures its continued relevance in assessing infrastructure for critical applications in the finance sector and beyond, influencing trends in enterprise information technology.

Category:Computer benchmarks Category:Database management systems Category:Financial technology