TPC-C, short for Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark C, is a benchmark used to compare the performance of online transaction processing (OLTP) systems. This industry standard was published in August 1992, and eventually replaced the earlier TPC-A, which was declared obsolete in 1995. It has undergone a number of changes to keep it relevant as computer performance grew by several orders of magnitude, with the current version as of 2021, 5.11, released in 2010. In 2006, a newer OLTP benchmark was added to the suite, TPC-E, but TPC-C remains in widespread use. The TPC-C system models a multi-warehouse wholesale operation, known simply as "the Company". In a minimal test, the company has ten warehouses, each with ten user terminals. Each warehouse serves ten defined sales districts, each with 3,000 customers who are ordering against a product catalog of 100,000 items. The most frequent transactions are customer orders, with an average of ten items on each order, and customer payments. Less frequent requests query the status of orders and warehouse inventory, ship orders and replenish stocks that get low. To test the performance of a given system, the number of warehouses is increased to meet the required minimum needed to measure the targeted performance level. The results of the benchmark are measured in transactions per minute, known as tpmC. The first tpmC result was published in September 1992 for an IBM AS/400 and returned a result of 54 tpmC. By the 2000s, the average result for high-end machines was 2.4 million tpmC, and companies were building systems of very large size in an effort to capture the record. The current record was set in 2025 using Alibaba Cloud's PolarDB that provided 2.055 billion tpmC. Recent results for smaller on-premises systems have focused on lowering the cost-per-tpmC. IBM modified TPC-C to create a simplified version known as the Commercial Processing Workload for their own internal use. Similar conversions are commonplace but generally not known outside the respective companies.
History
Prior work The release of relational databases like Oracle led to debates within the industry between the relational model and the older CODASYL concepts. Out of these debates grew a desire to offer realistic performance estimates. In 1985, Jim Gray of Tandem Computers co-authored a paper now known as "Anon et.al.", which outlined a potential standard named DebitCredit. This quickly saw many modifications and apples-to-oranges comparison, which, in turn, led to a June 1988 effort by Tom Sawyer and Omri Serlin to standardize the system and publish a new version. The publication of this version and ongoing controversy over its use led to the August 1988 creation of an industry consortium named the Transaction Processing Performance Council, or TPC, to take over such work and create a formal industry standard. The TPC produced its first industry standard benchmark, named TPC-A, on the basis of DebitCredit with the addition of full ACID properties. Other requirements were primarily organizational; to submit a result one now had to provide complete details of the system and testing, with 3rd party audits suggested, and any pricing information had to include maintenance contracts over a period of five years. A related benchmark was released shortly after and named TPC-B, which differed primarily in that it used batch inputs rather than emulating terminal input.
Order-Entry
Around the time that TPC-A was being finalized, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was working on a new distributed database system, RdbStar. This led to the development of a new benchmark to measure the performance of the new database system. The RdbStar performance team surveyed many existing pre-TPC benchmarks like the Wisconsin benchmark, AS3AP, and the Set Query Benchmark. They also examined real-world database use cases from a canvassing of DEC's European division's customers. Ultimately they selected components of an unpublished workload from the Austin-based Microelectronics and Computer Consortium that simulated a warehousing operation. The team used this workload as the basis for their own benchmark, known as Order-Entry. By the time TPC-B had been published in August 1990, there were already concerns that Debit/Credit was too simple and not really modeling typical workloads. In November a new effort started with a call to industry to provide a new benchmark. IBM responded with their RAMP-C while DEC offered Order-Entry. DEC's proposal was selected, and its primary author, Francois Raab, was selected as technical lead for the standardization effort. This effort lasted eighteen months and culminated in the release of TPC-C version 1.0 on 13 August 1992.
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