OLAP/OLTP

Databases fall into 2 main categories: those fit for handling business logic, and those fit for handling business analytics.

OLAP are used for business analysis, and feed into reports that help the management of a company make better decisions (ie. business intelligence)

OLTP are used to handle business logic in the application.

PropertyTransaction processing systems (OLTP)Analytic systems (OLAP)
Main read patternSmall number of records per query, fetched by keyAggregate over large number of records
Main write patternRandom-access, low-latency writes from user inputBulk import (ETL) or event stream
Primarily used byEnd user/customer, via web applicationInternal analyst, for decision support
What data representsLatest state of data (current point in time)History of events that happened over time
Dataset sizeGigabytes to terabytesTerabytes to petabytes

In the past, both OLTP and OLAP operations were done on the same SQL databases, but soon after it was realized that analytics data should be stored in its own database. This is what are known as data warehouses today.


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