Comments on: Historical significance of TPC benchmarks http://www.softwarememories.com/2009/07/02/historical-significance-of-tpc-benchmarks/ History of software, by somebody who lived it Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:36:06 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Curt Monash http://www.softwarememories.com/2009/07/02/historical-significance-of-tpc-benchmarks/#comment-39266 Curt Monash Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:12:26 +0000 http://www.softwarememories.com/?p=37#comment-39266 Makes sense, Serge. Thanks. Makes sense, Serge. Thanks.

]]> By: Serge Rielau http://www.softwarememories.com/2009/07/02/historical-significance-of-tpc-benchmarks/#comment-39263 Serge Rielau Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:25:38 +0000 http://www.softwarememories.com/?p=37#comment-39263 Curt, An interesting post. There is no doubt in my mind that both TPC benchmarks caused product improvements. It pays however to give developers some credit here. We are at heart lazy creatures and do hate throw-away code. Let's take TPC-D and "materialized views" for example. There was a race between Oracle and IBM DB2 at the time as to who gets them out first and of course one major marketing goal was certainly to bat the TPC-D performance numbers out of the ballpark which rendered the whole benchmark obsolete within months. A more recent example is TPC-C. Remember those Oracle adds on "IBM won't say". Eventually soem IBM exec must have had it and decided that enough is enough. What followed was a flurry of activities resulting in DB2 8.1.4 and the breach of the 700k, 1M and now 6M TpmC threshholds. You might say that all features delivered in DB2 8.1.4 were specifically implemented for the benchmark. that is true as far as motivation is concerned (i.e. executive funding). The features however, such as a rewrite of DB2's logger for ultra high performance, "alternate page cleaners", and my personal toy the "unification of queries and updates". Essentially we developers don't care for the excuse to put in features which we believe will benefit the product. I'm confident this is no different for other vendors. Cheers Serge Curt,

An interesting post. There is no doubt in my mind that both TPC benchmarks caused product improvements. It pays however to give developers some credit here. We are at heart lazy creatures and do hate throw-away code.
Let’s take TPC-D and “materialized views” for example. There was a race between Oracle and IBM DB2 at the time as to who gets them out first and of course one major marketing goal was certainly to bat the TPC-D performance numbers out of the ballpark which rendered the whole benchmark obsolete within months.
A more recent example is TPC-C. Remember those Oracle adds on “IBM won’t say”. Eventually soem IBM exec must have had it and decided that enough is enough. What followed was a flurry of activities resulting in DB2 8.1.4 and the breach of the 700k, 1M and now 6M TpmC threshholds.
You might say that all features delivered in DB2 8.1.4 were specifically implemented for the benchmark. that is true as far as motivation is concerned (i.e. executive funding).
The features however, such as a rewrite of DB2’s logger for ultra high performance, “alternate page cleaners”, and my personal toy the “unification of queries and updates”. Essentially we developers don’t care for the excuse to put in features which we believe will benefit the product. I’m confident this is no different for other vendors.

Cheers
Serge

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