- Year not given · 3 marks
Short note: OLAP and OLTP
Short answer
OLTP processes many short daily transactions such as inserts, updates, deletes on current detailed normalised data. OLAP supports analysis and decision making with complex queries over historical summarised multidimensional data, using roll-up, drill-down, slice, dice and pivot operations.
Write a short note on OLAP and OLTP.
OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) handles the day-to-day operations of an organisation: many short transactions such as insert, update, delete (bank deposit, ticket booking). Data is current, detailed and normalised, and the main concerns are speed of transactions, consistency and concurrency.
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) supports analysis and decision making: complex queries over large historical, summarised, multidimensional data. It offers operations such as roll-up, drill-down, slice, dice and pivot.
| Point | OLTP | OLAP |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Day-to-day transactions | Analysis, decision support |
| Users | Clerks, clients, DBAs | Managers, analysts, executives |
| Data | Current, detailed, flat relational | Historical, summarised, multidimensional |
| Database design | ER model, normalised, application-oriented | Star/snowflake, subject-oriented |
| Access | Read/write, short transactions | Mostly read, complex queries |
| Unit of work | Short, simple transaction | Complex query with aggregates |
| Records per access | Tens | Millions |
| Number of users | Thousands | Hundreds |
| DB size | MB to GB | GB to TB |
| Metric | Transaction throughput | Query response time |
✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)
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