Tracking the Power in an Enterprise Decision Support System

Enterprises rely on decision support systems to influence critical business choices. At the same time, IT-related power costs are growing and are a key concern for enterprise executives. Yet, there is little work to date characterizing the power use of decision support systems. Towards this end, we present the first holistic measurements and analysis of an audit-class system running the TPC-H decision support benchmark at the 300GB scale. We first provide a breakdown of the system's power use into its core hardware components. We then explore its power-performance tradeoffs. This investigation shows that there is ample room to improve its energy use without sacrificing much performance. Moreover, the most energy-efficient configuration depends on the workload. These results suggest that, going forward, database software has an important role to play in optimizing for energy use.