What is the difference between TPC-C, TPC-E and TPC-H benchmark?
I am getting confused with different types of TPC benchmarks. What are the major differences between TPC-C, TPC-E and TPC-H benchmark?
Answer
TPC-C (circa 1992) models an 'old school' OLTP application that looks like a wholesale distributor with a small number of warehouses full of inventory servicing a larger number of retail locations. In this context it measures 'transactions per minute' (tpmC). It assumes old-school IT architectures where DRAM is very scarce and as such it relies heavily on disk IO.
TPC-E is a modern OLTP application that models a stock brokerage and uses a much more sophisticated simulated world driven by fluctuating stock prices and emulates a chaotic 'outside world' of customers placing market orders, limit orders and stop-limit orders. TPC-E assumes modern IT architecture where DRAM and compute resources are more plentiful and therefore it does not rely as much on storage performance.
TPC-H is an OLAP workload that measures query analytics in a 'data warehouse' context.
In a nutshell, TPC-E is good for OLTP, TPC-H is for OLAP and TPC-C is basically obsolete.