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| Formation | 1988 |
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| Type | Not-for-profit |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, US |
| Members | Hardware and software vendors, market researchers, educational institutions, consultants |
| Website | www |
The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), founded in 1988, is a non-profit organization founded to define benchmarks for transaction processing and databases, and to publish objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. TPC benchmarks are used in evaluating the performance of computer systems, and TPC publishes the results.
The first benchmark from the organization, known as TPC-A, was released in November 1989. It simulated a simple accounting system and was based on earlier work by Tandem Computers' Debit-Credit program. Companies would run this program on their system and submit the results along with details about the machine and the costs of buying and maintaining it for a period of five years.
As computer power grew exponentially during this period, TPC-A was considered too simple to simulate real-world workflows even as it was published. A new standard, TPC-C, was released in July 1992. This was based on Digital's Order-Entry program which simulated a multi-site warehousing company performing a variety of queries against a much more complex database. TPC-C remains in widespread use to this day.
The TPC has released a number of new benchmarks since then. TPC-E, released in February 2007, is intended to be a modern replacement for TPC-C, including a wider variety of transaction types and a more complex database structure. Although it sees widespread use, TPC-C also remains widely used. They have also published a series of more specialized benchmarks for decision support, virtualization and big data, among others.