Latest news with #TPC-C
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Speed Means Nothing If You're Down: Benchmarking For The Real World
Spencer Kimball is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs. For decades, database performance benchmarks like TPC-C (Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark C) chased peak throughput under ideal conditions. Systems were scaled vertically and micro-optimized at every layer to game benchmarks and maximize transactions per second (TPS). But times—and technology—have changed. Today's applications live everywhere: across regions, clouds and availability zones. They're always on, global and expected to perform flawlessly despite disruptions. Users now demand instant banking balances, lag-free global broadcasts, immediate access to patient records and real-time inventory updates across international supply chains. These aren't aspirations; they're baseline expectations, assumed and demanded unequivocally. Modern workloads are unpredictable, highly distributed and intensely data-driven. Fraud detection, logistics tracking and AI-powered automation now run continuously at a global scale. Autonomous systems assume constant availability and consistency. They don't pause for outages or wait for recovery. They expect the system to be fast, consistent and always available. Yet legacy benchmarks still focus on raw throughput, rarely accounting for the realities of modern architecture: latency spikes, node crashes or regional outages. The true measure of performance isn't speed under ideal conditions—it's resilience under failure. If anyone doubts the importance of resilience, recent history is rife with cautionary tales. • Costco's Black Friday outage in 2019 allegedly cost millions in sales. • Ticketmaster's 2022 crash during Taylor Swift's ticket sales revealed its infrastructure was unprepared for massive spikes. • A faulty update in 2024 froze hospital electronic health records, forcing clinicians to revert to paper and risking patient safety. • CrowdStrike's 2024 outage halted global freight logistics due to insufficient resilience planning. • Barclays and Capital One outages in 2025 left millions unable to access banking services, demonstrating that even leading institutions aren't immune. There is a perennial thread running through this representative sampling of recent failures: The rising complexity of modern applications requires a shift in mindset to resilience as a first-order goal. Modern infrastructure complexity—multiregion, multicloud and governed by stringent regulations like GDPR, PDPA and DORA—demands new benchmarks that prioritize resilience as a fundamental metric, not an afterthought. Benchmarks that ignore this operational and compliance complexity are no longer sufficient. True resilience testing involves deliberately introducing controlled chaos: killing nodes, dropping disks, simulating outages. The objective is clear: Observe the system's behavior under stress. Does it reroute traffic seamlessly? Are transactions duplicated, delayed or lost? How rapidly does performance return to baseline? These aren't trivial operational details—they're critical indicators of system integrity. Chaos testing, a methodology where systems are intentionally stressed to uncover hidden vulnerabilities, is gaining traction. However, resilience testing often remains disconnected from standard performance metrics like throughput and latency. Integrating these tests ensures resilience isn't merely theoretical but quantifiable and central to system design. Just as vehicle performance isn't judged solely by top speed, database benchmarks shouldn't focus exclusively on maximum throughput. Benchmarks must evolve to measure continuity, recovery speed and stability under real-world pressures. Systems engineered with built-in replication, self-healing automation and geographic consensus aren't merely technically superior; they're strategically essential. These aren't just engineering choices; they're risk strategies. And they should be part of how we measure value. Speed without resilience is meaningless. Challenge your teams and vendors to prove resilience under chaos. If they can't, they're not ready for today's demands. The ultimate benchmark isn't the fastest lap—it's staying on track when legacy systems are stuck rebuilding in the pit. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Mid East Info
05-03-2025
- Business
- Mid East Info
Alibaba Cloud's PolarDB Breaks TPC-C Benchmark World Record with Innovative ‘Three-Layer Decoupling' Architecture
The cloud-native database showcases record-breaking performance and enhanced efficiency. March 2025 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has set a new world record with its cloud-native relational database PolarDB in the TPC-C benchmark. Developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), the TPC-C benchmark evaluates the performance of Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems. According to the TPC-C results, PolarDB achieved 2.055 billion transactions per minute (tpmC), 2.5 times higher than the previous record holder, while reducing the cost per transaction (price/tpmC) by almost 40% to CNY 0.8 (USD 0.11). Additionally, during an 8-hour stress test, PolarDB successfully processed 2.2 trillion data operations with 100% data accuracy, and maintained a tpmC fluctuation rate of just 0.16%, an order of magnitude lower than the TPC-C benchmark requirement of 2%. PolarDB's achievement of 2.055 billion tpmC in the TPC-C benchmark is 59 times the peak transaction volume recorded during the Tmall 11.11 Shopping Festival in 2020. Dr Feifei Li, President of Database Products Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said: 'This remarkable achievement is a testament to our team's relentless pursuit of innovation and excellence in database technology. PolarDB's performance in the TPC-C benchmark showcases its capability to handle the most demanding workloads while emphasizing our commitment to providing cost-effective and scalable solutions. With innovative architecture, managing cloud-native databases will be as simple as 'building blocks'. We will continue to support our customers to effectively manage and utilize data to thrive in the digital era.' The TPC-C benchmark is designed to assess a database's performance under extreme conditions. It challenges a database to maintain data accuracy under significant stress, guarantee data consistency during software and hardware failure, and ensure data availability, consistency, and integrity under stress conditions. TPC-C is recognized as one of the most authoritative OLTP benchmarks in the industry. PolarDB's record-breaking performance is driven by its innovative architecture. Its Limitless Architecture features a 'three-layer decoupling' design, which enhances efficiency by enabling the independent scaling of computing, memory, and storage for optimal elasticity. This exceptional performance is further boosted through software-hardware integration and advanced database kernel optimization technologies, including transaction processing improvement, index structure refinements, and I/O path enhancements. PolarDB is a cloud-native relational database that is designed for business-critical database applications that require fast performance, high concurrency, and automatic scaling. This solution has supported the digital journey of over 10,000 enterprise customers across various sectors worldwide, including TNG eWallet, the largest fintech platform in Malaysia; Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), a major player in Chinese TV program production based in Hong Kong; enish, Inc., a mobile game development company in Japan; and DOKU, one of Indonesia's leading payment technology companies. Alibaba Cloud offers a broad range of self-developed, cloud-native database products, including the relational database PolarDB, data warehouse AnalyticDB, multimodal database Lindorm, and Data Management Service (DMS), among others. For the fifth year in a row, Alibaba Cloud has been named a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS). About Alibaba Cloud: Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud ( is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Alibaba has been named the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner. It has also maintained its position as one of the world's leading public cloud IaaS service providers since 2018, according to IDC.
