A Dependability Benchmark for OLTP Application Environments

The ascendance of networked information in our economy and daily lives has increased the awareness of the importance of dependability features. OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) systems constitute the kernel of the information systems used today to support the daily operations of most of the business. Although these systems comprise the best examples of complex business-critical systems, no practical way has been proposed so far to characterize the impact of faults in such systems or to compare alternative solutions concerning dependability features. This paper proposes a dependability benchmark for OLTP systems. This dependability benchmark uses the workload of the TPC-C performance benchmark and specifies the measures and all the steps required to evaluate both the performance and key dependability features of OLTP systems, with emphasis on availability. This dependability benchmark is presented through a concrete example of benchmarking the performance and dependability of several different transactional systems configurations. The effort required to run the dependability benchmark is also discussed in detail.