More information on the TPC SOA benchmark

As I mentioned previously, the TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council) is looking at SOA benchmarking. SearchDataCenter.com has an article that summarizes alot of the new and upcoming TPC work. You will see the TPC chairman, Mike Molloy, talk about the popular existing TPC benchmarks (TPC-C, TPC-E, TPC-H, and TPC-App) as well as new benchmarking efforts around energy (consumption with focus on greening of the data center), virtualization (across all new workloads), ETL (Database Extract, Transform, Load), and SOA.

On SOA, Mike explains, "TPC's SOA benchmark is only in the proposal stage, but the tentative plan is to focus on common industry-accepted portions of SOA infrastructure, mainly Web services, the enterprise service bus, and business process choreography. As advanced SOA practices become more standard in the industry, TPC will expand the benchmark to incorporate additional SOA infrastructural services".

I'm excited to work within the TPC to continue driving this SOA performance benchmark to reality. There are no other standard benchmarks that tackle these common SOA infrastructural components. If you have interest in seeing such a benchmark or comments on how it would help you, please post a comment. I'll relay them back to the TPC.

The TPC is working on a SOA Benchmark proposal submitted by IBM

Given the comments I made previously on SOA benchmarking, I'm happy to report that the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has agreed to evaluate an SOA benchmark proposal submitted by IBM. You can see in the recent "Meet the TPC" working session, the TPC discussed the TPC SOA workgroup on page 8. The summary is rather high level - "Tasked to evaluate SOA benchmark proposal from IBM". I believe if this proposal is accepted with modifications by other TPC participants, customers of SOA solutions and the industry can truly benefit from the TPC's standards-based benchmarking experience and levels of customer trust. I personally will be working to make this workgroup a success, with the intent of making SOA performance as understood as hardware, database, and J2EE performance. If there are companies out there with SOA solutions, I would personally encourage them to join the TPC and participate in this or other benchmarks and workgroups. I hope to, in the future, blog about the success of this workgroup and benchmark.