ACADEMIA

The TPC also launches TPC-DS, a new industry standard benchmark to integrate key aspects of modern decision support systems

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has announced a call-for-papers for its fourth annual Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (TPCTC 2012). The conference will be collocated with the 38^th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2012) on August 27, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

The TPC is a co-sponsor of VLDB 2012, and conference registration information is available online at http://www.vldb2012.org/. Selected papers will be presented during the conference, published in Springer’s Lecture Notes on Computer Science (both in print and electronic formats), and may be considered for either future benchmark developments or enhancements to existing benchmark standards.

The deadline for abstract submission is May 25, 2012. Researchers and industry experts are encouraged to submit ideas and methodologies in performance evaluation, measurement and characterization in areas including, but not limited to: big data, cloud computing, business intelligence, energy and space efficiency, hardware and software innovations and lessons learned in practice using TPC and other benchmark workloads. Further information is available online at http://www.tpc.org/tpctc2012/.

Notably, Michael J. Carey, Donald Bren Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, is confirmed as the TPCTC keynote speaker. "TPC benchmarks have been hugely influential in driving technical progress in the database field for many years.  The TPC continues to bring new benchmark standards to the industry, and the TPCTC is an invaluable forum for presenting and discussing new ideas for future benchmark standards,” said Dr. Carey. “Ideas submitted at past conferences have culminated in the creation of benchmark development committees for several potential standards, and with so much buzz today related to cloud computing, NoSQL databases, and 'Big Data', this year's conference has the potential to be particularly exciting."

“The TPCTC is an unparalleled venue in which innovative ideas are presented in the context of developing next generation benchmark standards” said Raghunath Nambiar, general chair of the conference and a performance strategist at Cisco. “Industry experts have voiced overwhelming support for past conferences, and we anticipate a number of compelling new ideas this year in emerging areas like Big Data management and analytics.”

Organizations that are interested in influencing the TPC benchmarking development process are encouraged to become members. Additional information is available online at http://www.tpc.org/information/about/join.asp

TPC-DS

The TPC is also announcing a new decision support benchmark (TPC-DS), which has been carefully designed to measure query throughput and data integration performance for a given hardware configuration, operating system, and DBMS configuration under a controlled, complex, multi-user decision support workload.

TPC-DS models the decision support functions of a retail product supplier. The supporting schema contains vital business information such as customer, order and product data. Its workload is designed to test the upward boundaries of hardware system performance in several areas including CPU utilization, memory utilization, I/O subsystem utilization and the ability of the operating system and database software to perform various complex functions important to decision support systems (DSS). These areas include examining large volumes of data, computing and executing the best execution plan for queries with a high degree of complexity, efficiently scheduling a large number of user sessions, giving answers to critical business questions and periodically synchronizing the data warehouse by means of a data integration process with OLTP sources.

“TPC-DS assesses a broad range of system topologies and implementation methodologies in a technically rigorous and directly comparable, vendor-neutral manner,” said Meikel Poess, Chairman of the TPC-DS committee. “It is the first benchmark specification to integrate key workloads of modern decision support systems including ad-hoc queries, reporting queries, OLAP queries, data mining queries and data integration from OLTP systems.”

Additional information is available online: http://www.tpc.org/tpcds/