A Measure of Transaction Processing 20 Years Later

TL;DR

This paper retrospectively analyzes the long-term progress in transaction processing and sorting performance, highlighting significant improvements over 20 years despite hardware performance plateaus.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of performance trends in transaction processing and sorting, quantifying improvements over two decades.

Findings

Transaction processing performance improved 100,000x

Price-performance increased 100,000x

Sort/sequential performance doubled annually

Abstract

This provides a retrospective of the paper "A Measure of Transaction Processing" published in 1985. It shows that transaction processing peak performance and price-peformance have improved about 100,000x respectively and that sort/sequential performance has approximately doubled each year (so a million fold improvement) even though processor performance plateaued in 1995.