TPC Benchmarks Don't Matter Anymore

Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmarks, once widely accepted as the standard DBMS benchmark, are becoming obsolete. Why? First, all top-tier DBMS vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, and Teradata are delivering high performance and scalability to support most large workloads. Second, TPC benchmarks no longer reflect the complex workloads of today's real-world deployments. Third, customers that need high-end performance often prefer internal benchmarks to TPC benchmarks. Finally, virtualization, cloud computing, and database-as-a-service are changing the way customers deploy databases, and TPC does not address these architectures. Enterprise architects performing assessments should not waste their time on TPC benchmarks of top-tier DBMS products, and tech industry marketers and product managers should redirect the millions they spend on benchmark engineering toward automated tuning and performance optimization.