What is a TPC Benchmark?

TPC is an acronym for Transaction Processing Corporation, a non-profit organization to define transaction processing benchmarks and providing objective, verifiable performance data to the industry.

Here is the scope of TPC from its website (http://www.tpc.org/information/about/abouttpc.asp):

"The term transaction is often applied to a wide variety of business and computer functions. Looked at as a computer function, a transaction could refer to a set of operations including disk read/writes, operating system calls, or some form of data transfer from one subsystem to another.

While TPC benchmarks certainly involve the measurement and evaluation of computer functions and operations, the TPC regards a transaction as it is commonly understood in the business world: a commercial exchange of goods, services, or money. A typical transaction, as defined by the TPC, would include the updating to a database system for such things as inventory control (goods), airline reservations (services), or banking (money).

In these environments, a number of customers or service representatives input and manage their transactions via a terminal or desktop computer connected to a database. Typically, the TPC produces benchmarks that measure transaction processing (TP) and database (DB) performance in terms of how many transactions a given system and database can perform per unit of time, e.g., transactions per second or transactions per minute"

Here is what SQL Server 2017 performance looks like.