The most transactions a database has ever run in a minute

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2,055,076,649 transactions a minute

Held by Alibaba Cloud PolarDB Limitless. Set 2025-01-27, and has stood for 610 days. Written down here 2026-09-18.

A transaction is the smallest piece of work a business database does and then promises never to lose: take the order, reserve the stock, bill the account, all of it or none of it. This benchmark counts how many of those a system finishes in a minute while four other kinds of work run against the same data, on a model of a wholesale supplier that the council fixed in 1992 and has not changed since. That is the reason to keep it. Nearly every other number on this page is measured on a test younger than the thing it measures, and rewritten whenever the thing outgrows it; this one has been the same test for thirty-four years, run by an industry body whose members are the vendors being ranked, checked by an independent auditor, and published with the price of the machine attached to the score. The oldest result the list still carries was submitted in June 2000 and ran at sixty thousand a minute. The record is now over two billion. The shape of the climb is the part worth looking at: it stalled completely between 2011 and 2019, because one very large computer was as far as the design went, and it restarted when the entrants stopped being one computer and started being a thousand ordinary ones rented by the hour.

That description was written when this frontier was opened, on 2026-09-18, and is never rewritten. Where it and the number above it disagree, the number is the reading and the description is history.

What counts

The largest figure in the tpmC column of the TPC-C all-results list - new orders completed in a minute, on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's own benchmark, by any system it has ever validated. The list is sorted on that column, so the largest figure is usually the top row, but the reading is taken by sorting the column in a script and never by trusting the order. Two rules belong on the number rather than under it. A result the council marks Withdrawn does not count, and that status is read from the winning row's own detail page rather than from the colour the list paints the row; a result marked Historical does count, because the mark means the price quoted beside the figure has gone stale, not that the machine did not do the work. So this is an all-time maximum and not the current top of the council's ranked list, and the two can differ.

What moves it

The council validates a submission carrying a larger figure than the one last recorded here. Results are published as they clear review rather than to a conference calendar, so this can move in any week - and it has moved in four of the last eight years after eight years of nothing.

Where to check it: https://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results5.asp

Last checked: 2026-09-26

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