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On October 2, the International Affairs performance Committee (TPC) announced that in the newly released TPC-C ranking, Ant Financial Services Group's self-developed database OceanBase ranked first. The InfoQ reporter immediately interviewed Yang Chuanhui (Rizhao), a researcher of Ant Financial Services Group and the main architect of OceanBase, and asked him to interpret the TPC-C list and introduce the process and significance of OceanBase's official participation in TPC-C ranking after accumulating for more than nine years. Please introduce the test results of TPC-C in terms of professionalism and authority, participation standards and participation process. What does it mean for database vendors?

TPC is a non-profit organization founded by dozens of member companies, founded in 1988, headquartered in the United States, Turing Award winner Jim Gray is the founder. The members of TPC are mainly the mainstream computer software and hardware manufacturers in the industry, whose responsibility is to formulate standards and specifications for enterprise application benchmark evaluation, measure the performance and cost performance of the overall system, and manage the certification and release of test results. A number of database products from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and other companies have participated in this test many times and are the holders of major leading scores. TPC-C is a benchmark test on the transaction processing capability of OLTP database developed by TPC organization. Customers in key fields such as finance, telecommunications, government and so on generally refer to the TPC-C results to measure the transaction processing capacity of each database manufacturer.

Only if it is certified on the official TPC website and the test results audited by international institutions are the test results approved by TPC institutions. TPC-C authentication requirements are very stringent, ranging from performance, functionality, data consistency and disaster recovery, to the price of mouse and keyboard used during the test, all need to be strictly disclosed to ensure that the test can be reproduced and consistent with the real business scenario. The OceanBase TPC-C certification process alone takes more than half a year.

The core competence of database includes performance, cost, function, ecology and so on, and TPC-C is the most authoritative performance testing benchmark of OLTP database in the world. It is the dream of every OLTP database manufacturer to reach the top of TPC-C, which means that it has world-class transaction processing capacity and can meet the transaction processing needs of core systems in both the Internet and key areas such as finance, telecommunications, government and so on. At present, Ant Financial Services Group is the only Chinese company on the TPC-C index.

Has OceanBase participated in the benchmark before? What are the achievements?

Almost every OLTP database runs TPC-C benchmarks in the test environment, and OceanBase is no exception. Although OceanBase has accumulated very good high concurrent transaction processing capabilities in business scenarios such as Alibaba's "Singles Day", it is very difficult for TPC-C to "hit the list". It took OceanBase more than nine years to formally participate in the TPC-C ranking.

Please describe in detail the whole process of OceanBase participating in the test, including: how to participate? What do you need to cooperate with and submit in the process?

Every database manufacturer can participate in TPC-C, just contact the official organization of TPC by email to sign up. The key lies in whether the database manufacturer has the ability to pass the test and get good results.

OceanBase TPC audit is divided into three stages: the first stage is called the preparation stage, which implements the necessary functions and optimizes the performance according to the requirements of the TPC-C specification. This stage requires a clear understanding of the test specification and a clear communication of each question with the auditor by email. It should be noted that the TPC-C audit is very strict and must be refined to every entry of the TPC-C specification, and any non-compliance with the specification will cause the test to fail; the second stage is called on-site pre-audit, and the US auditors came to Ant Financial Services Group's headquarters in Hangzhou to complete the whole process of functional testing, ACID testing, performance testing, downtime testing, architecture and code Review, performance costing, etc., together with OceanBase team members. At that time, some problems were found in the process, and the OceanBase team made all the corrections in the next few weeks; the third stage was called formal audit, in which the OceanBase team modified all the problems found in the pre-audit phase according to the checklist given by the auditor, confirmed each item by the auditor before running the final test, and finally completed the full disclosure report of FDR (Full Disclosure Report) and formally submitted the results to the TPC Technical Committee.

How should we understand the meaning behind all kinds of related indicators in the TOP10 results disclosed on the official website? Such as performance, price, CPU...

Some of the TPC-C TOP10 results are tested by database companies and some are tested by hardware companies. The hardware architecture and database software architecture of different tests may be different. TPC-C is an open testing benchmark, no matter what architecture is used to participate in the test, as long as it conforms to the TPC-C specification, the final measure is mainly two: one is performance (tpmC), and the other is cost-effective (price/tpmC). Performance indicates how fast the database can run, and the performance-to-price ratio indicates how low the cost of the database can be.

With regard to performance, the TPC-C test simulates merchandise trading, including five transactions: NewOrder creating new orders (nUnix), Payment paying orders (43%), OrderStatus querying recent orders (4%), Delivery bulk shipping orders (4%), and StockLevel inventory status analysis (4%). Although TPC-C does not specify the proportion of NewOrder transactions, the proportion of NewOrder can be deduced from the proportion of the other four transactions.

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