OLTP and OLAP look similar but refer to different kinds of database systems. Both of them are online processing systems. When we talk about databases, most people think of OLTP. We can suppose that OLTP systems provide source data to the OLAP systems that help us to analyze the data.
What's OLTP?
OLTP stands for Online Transactional Processing and the main focus of OLTP is to excel in looking up filtered information and manage current Update, Insertion, and Deletion while a transaction.OLTP workloads consist of short transaction that runs in a small period concurrently. So OLTP database effectiveness can be measured by the number of transactions per second.
Common tasks for OLTP:
- What is the userID of the current user?
- What is the current location of the user?
- Delete billing information of a specific user or group.
- Update user information.
Common OLTP systems :
- Mysql
- Oracle Database
- Postgresql
- Microsoft SQL
- IBM DB2
What's OLAP?
OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing system. In contrast OLTP systems, OLAP database is designed to store historical data to process large datasets to answer questions about data. The main focus of OLAP to help us extract useful information from different multi-dimensional data.
Common tasks for OLAP:
- What's the user life-time value of an application?
- What's the average age of users on a web platform?
- User activities over time.
- All data warehouse tasks.
Common OLAP systems :
- Amazon Redshift
- IBM Netezza
- HP Vertica
- KDB+
