What's OLTP?
Online transactional processing AKA OLTP is a processing system that exists within a database that handles Transactions ( Update, Delete, Insert ) in an efficient way, it's made for the day-to-day transactions of an organization like when a new user is registred or when a user book a hotel ticket.
What's OLAP?
Online Analytics processing AKA OLAP is a processing system that exists within a data warehouse or a data mart that handles complex read queries ( SELECT ), OLAP systems are made for analytical reasons. the principal beneficiaries of OLAP are Data scientists, Data analysts, and Business analysts, an example of an OLAP system is when a school wants to know how many students have graduated from the school in the last 5 years
Characteristics of OLTP:
- OLTP databases store just current and relevant data
- it uses regular DBMS (Database management systems)
- OLTP databases store data in a row-based way
- used for business tasks
- OLTP databases store data in a normalized way
- the size of the data is small
- Response time is fast, it measured in milliseconds
- Data integrity is a must
- perform read and write queries
Characteristics of OLAP:
- it uses a data warehouse
- OLAP databases store historical data and data used for analytics
- used for data mining, analytics, decision making...
- OLAP databases store data in a column-based way
- OLAP databases store data in a denormalized way
- the size of the data is large
- Response time is slow, it is measured in seconds, minutes, or hours.
- data integrity isn't a must but it may affect analytics accuracy
- perform read queries
Main Difference between OLAP & OLTP:
from the list of characteristics above you may be able to know the difference between the two systems but to resume the article we will discuss the main difference in this section.
in a big project, taking Facebook as an example there is two main parts, the application part which describes the actions you can take like posting a new picture, sending a message to a friend, or modifying your profile information the Facebook application deals with a database that uses OLTP system to performs those operations which we talked about, talking about analytical part in the other hand Facebook in order to make decisions that affect their business they analyze data from OLAP databases.
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