TPC-H Analyzed: Hidden Messages and Lessons Learned from an Influential Benchmark

The TPC-D benchmark was developed almost 20 years ago, and even though its current existence as TPC-H could be considered superseded by TPC-DS, one can still learn from it. We focus on the technical level, summarizing the challenges posed by the TPC-H workload as we now understand them, which we call "choke points". We identify 28 different such choke points, grouped into six categories: Aggregation Performance, Join Performance, Data Access Locality, Expression Calculation, Correlated Subqueries and Parallel Execution. On the meta-level, we make the point that the rich set of choke-points found in TPC-H sets an example on how to design future DBMS benchmarks.