Home » Difference between OLTP and OLAP

Difference between OLTP and OLAP

by Online Tutorials Library

Difference between OLTP and OLAP

OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) is featured by a large number of short on-line transactions (INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE). The primary significance of OLTP operations is put on very rapid query processing, maintaining record integrity in multi-access environments, and effectiveness consistent by the number of transactions per second. In the OLTP database, there is an accurate and current record, and schema used to save transactional database is the entity model (usually 3NF).

OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing) is represented by a relatively low volume of transactions. Queries are very difficult and involve aggregations. For OLAP operations, response time is an effectiveness measure. OLAP applications are generally used by Data Mining techniques. In OLAP database there is aggregated, historical information, stored in multi-dimensional schemas (generally star schema).

Difference between OLTP and OLAP

Following are the difference between OLAP and OLTP system.

1) Users: OLTP systems are designed for office worker while the OLAP systems are designed for decision-makers. Therefore while an OLTP method may be accessed by hundreds or even thousands of clients in a huge enterprise, an OLAP system is suitable to be accessed only by a select class of manager and may be used only by dozens of users.

2) Functions: OLTP systems are mission-critical. They provide day-to-day operations of an enterprise and are largely performance and availability driven. These operations carry out simple repetitive operations. OLAP systems are management-critical to support the decision of enterprise support tasks using detailed investigation.

3) Nature: Although SQL queries return a set of data, OLTP methods are designed to step one record at the time, for example, a data related to the user who may be on the phone or in the store. OLAP system is not designed to deal with individual customer records. Instead, they include queries that deal with many data at a time and provide summary or aggregate information to a manager. OLAP applications include data stored in a data warehouses that have been extracted from many tables and possibly from more than one enterprise database.

4) Design: OLTP database operations are designed to be application-oriented while OLAP operations are designed to be subject-oriented. OLTP systems view the enterprise record as a collection of tables (possibly based on an entity-relationship model). OLAP operations view enterprise information as multidimensional).

5) Data: OLTP systems usually deal only with the current status of data. For example, a record about an employee who left three years ago may not be feasible on the Human Resources System. The old data may have been achieved on some type of stable storage media and may not be accessible online. On the other hand, OLAP systems needed historical data over several years since trends are often essential in decision making.

6) Kind of use: OLTP methods are used for reading and writing operations while OLAP methods usually do not update the data.

7) View: An OLTP system focuses primarily on the current data within an enterprise or department, which does not refer to historical data or data in various organizations. In contrast, an OLAP system spans multiple version of a database schema, due to the evolutionary process of an organization. OLAP system also deals with information that originates from different organizations, integrating information from many data stores. Because of their huge volume, these are stored on multiple storage media.

8) Access Patterns: The access pattern of an OLTP system consist primarily of short, atomic transactions. Such a system needed concurrency control and recovery techniques. However, access to OLAP systems is mostly read-only operations because these data warehouses store historical information.

The biggest difference between an OLTP and OLAP system is the amount of data analyzed in a single transaction. Whereas an OLTP handles many concurrent customers and queries touching only a single data or limited collection of records at a time, an OLAP system must have the efficiency to operate on millions of data to answer a single query.

Click here for more information


Next TopicOLAP Operations

You may also like