Keeping the TPC Relevant!

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1988 to define transaction processing and database benchmarks. Since then, the TPC has played a crucial role in providing the industry with relevant standards for total system performance, price-performance, and energy-efficiency comparisons. TPC benchmarks are widely used by database researchers and academia. Historically known for database-centric standards, the TPC has developed a benchmark for virtualization and is currently developing a multisource data integration benchmark. The technology landscape is changing at a rapid pace, challenging industry experts and researchers to develop innovative techniques for evaluating, measuring, and characterizing the performance of modern application systems. The Technology Conference series on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (TPCTC), introduced in 2009, and the new TPC-Express initiatives are steps taken by the TPC to be relevant in the coming years and beyond.