OSDL Launches Linux TPC Benchmark Tool

Open source developers might have reason to smile this week with the release of the Open Source Development Lab‘s (OSDL) suite of database workload tools, a first-ever offering that provides the same set of performance tools as used by many proprietary developers for testing commercial applications.

The Oregon-based non-profit Linux consortium officially went to market with OSDL-DBT, a benchmark engineering resource aimed at accelerating the migration of business applications to Linux by removing previous testing roadblocks for developers and companies.

“Our mission at OSDL is to give open source developers the resources they can’t get elsewhere because they’re proprietary or too expensive,” said Timothy Witham, lab director for OSDL.

According to OSDL, the new workload tools are database-independent so long as the software meets certain technical requirements, including transaction management and an ODBC driver.

The tool suite enables the testing of Web, online transaction processing, and decision support, and according to OSDL, the suite is a fair use implementation of the industry-standard Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), a non-profit corporation that objectively defines transaction processing and database benchmarks.

However, according to OSDL, the tools suite is not a complete implementation of TPC-audited benchmarks and results may not be used for commercial purposes.

“Making these tests open source and available over the Web will enable both kernel and application developers to optimize their software for environments that closely simulate the demands of data center computing,” said Bill Claybrook, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group.

OSDL’s new offering is available through its Scalable Test Platform, an automated kernel testing platform.

Three-year-old, independently governed OSDL is sponsored by a long list of industry heavyweights, including Red Hat, Alcatel, Cisco, Computer Associates, Dell, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, and Mitsubishi Electric.

OSDL’s mission is to provide open source developers with the needed resources to deploy Linux-based applications within the telecommunications and business industries.