Ingres VectorWise crushes TPC-H benchmark

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 16 February 2011 00:05

Ingres has set a new record on a Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark, achieving a massive improvement on the previous record on the same hardware.

There's nothing unusual about breaking TPC benchmark records, but improvements tend to be incremental. But the new record set by Ingres for the TPC-H benchmark at the 100GB scale factor is an astounding 3.4 times faster than the old mark.

The new record of 251,561 QphH (Queries per hour) for 100 GB of data was set by Ingres's VectorWise database running on one HP ProLiant DL380 G7. The previous record was set this time last year by achieving 73,974 QphH@100GB on the same hardware.

"It's no surprise to us" that VectorWise made such a big difference where previous improvements were incremental, said Jason Leonidas, managing director of Ingres Australia (with responsibility for the Asia Pacific region). "We've completely re-engineered the way the DBMS handles these workloads... Nobody [else] has tried anything really different."

He explained that the TPC-H benchmark is designed to represent reporting and analytical workloads on a data warehouse. The more commonly-quoted TPC-C benchmark is for transactional databases. "They use very different queries designed for different workloads," he said.

Mr Leonidas said the previous TPC-H performance was achieved on a 12-node system. "12 is substantial - that's a serious deployment," he said, pointing out that apart from the initial hardware cost, being able to run on a single node saves electricity and data centre space, and requires few people to manage the system.

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