A Modeling Study of the TPC-C Benchmark

The TPC-C benchmark is a new benchmark approved by the TPC council intended for comparing database platforms running a medium complexity transaction processing workload. Some key aspects in which this new benchmark differs from the TPC-A benchmark are in having several transaction types, some of which are more complex than that in TPC-A, and in having data access skew. In this paper we present results from a modelling study of the TPC-C benchmark for both single node and distributed database management systems. We simulate the TPC-C workload to determine expected buffer miss rates assuming an LRU buffer management policy. These miss rates are then used as inputs to a throughput model. From these models we show the following 1 We quantify the data access skew as specified in the benchmark and show what fraction of the accesses go to what fraction of the data. 2 We quantify the resulting buffer hit ratios for each relation as a function of buffer size. 3 We show that close to linear scale-up about 3 from the ideal can be achieved in a distributed system, assuming replication of a read-only table. 4 We examine the effect of packing hot tuples into pages and show that significant priceperformance benefit can be thus achieved. 5 Finally, by coupling the buffer simulations with the throughput model, we examine typical diskmemory configurations that maximize the overall priceperformance. Database, Transaction processing, Tpc-c, Modeling