OLTP vs OLAP

Difference Between OLTP and OLAP

OLTP is expanded as Online Transactional Processing, and OLAP is expanded as Online Analytical Processing. As the name says, OLTP is the process of managing and updating the transactions in the databases, whereas OLAP is the process of retrieving the required data from the database for the purpose of using it for Analytical actions. Therefore, OLTP is usually simple and involves effortless querying in the system, while OLAP is a complex system with larger volumes of data and hence requires complicated querying.

Online Transactional Processing (OLTP)

In order for Big/Medium companies to carry out their administrative/business or sales tasks, it is compulsory to have OLTP systems in place that should take care of the huge number of transactions that are happening every day.

Example

An example of an OLTP system is a mega grocery store. For e.g., a person buys 15 products and goes to the counter for billing. Now it’s the OLTP system that will be taking care of transactions that are to happen. Let’s count the number of transactions that might happen.

• The first should be the invoice of the bill that will be generated and stored in DB.
• The second transaction might be product information insertion in the database against the invoice.
• If the customer has any loyalty cards, and if he uses them, a transaction will happen that will deduct the points from his cards and will update the new point for his card.
• The other transactions are to reduce the total count of products by the number of products the customer bought. For e.g., if the megastore was having 3489 packets of curd packets and the customer bought 2 of them, a transaction will happen, which will update the total count to 3489 minus 2, i.e. 3487. Similar transactions will happen for other products as well.

So a couple of examples of the OLTP system are:

• ATM
• Banks
• Malls
• Booking trains and flights online
• E-commerce

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

There are very low transactions that are happening at the OLAP level, and they help the business to make better decisions. OLAP systems allow users to analyze the data from more than one database; the reason why ETL is imposed as data from the different databases is in a different format. So before storing them in Data Warehouse, ETL is imposed.

Example

An E-commerce company would like to compare the figure of its sales for the month of February and March and would also like to see the sales region-wise, then state-wise, time-wise and finally country-wise.

In order to achieve this, a system should be in place which will insert the data from different OLTP Databases to the Data warehouse and apply the ETL process. Then OLAP developers will fetch data from the OLAP system and create different types of reports and charts based on the business requirement. Examples of OLAP software is – SAP BI/BO/BOBJ, Power BI from Microsoft, Tableau, Spotify, SAS, Python and R, Excel, Apache Spark, Splunk, Google Analytics.

Head To Head Comparison Between OLTP and OLAP (Infographics)

Below is the top 12 comparison between OLTP vs OLAP:

Advantages And Disadvantages of OLTP and OLAP:

Below are the pros and cons of OLTP vs OLAP:

OLTP

Here are the following advantages and disadvantages of OLTP mention below

Advantages

• It greatly simplifies the transactional events of an organization by providing a robust mechanism to process and store the transactional data.
• OLTP systems are very fast and instant.
• They increase the customer count of an organization by making individual processes simplified

Disadvantages

• Almost no insight into data analytics.
• In case of server failure, the transaction might result in delays and, in some case, might lead to data loss.
• More prone to attack by hackers.

OLAP

Here are the following advantages and disadvantages of OLAP mention below

Advantages

• A single platform for addressing analytics for data coming from different sources.
• Data from different sources are stored in a centralized location, thereby enabling easier access to large information.
• Accurate and fast computations.
• High-level security.

Disadvantages

• The cost of implementing OLAP is high due to the licensed and high-priced software.
• The full end-to-end monitoring, implementation, upgrades of OLAP systems is dependent on IT experts that are specialized in this area.
• Since it might be the possibility that there is more than one database involved for data insertion from OLTP to OLAP systems, to remain in line with all the DB teams might pose a challenge.

Comparison table between OLTP vs OLAP System

Basis of Comparison	OLTP (Online Transactional Processing Systems)	OLAP (Online Transactional Analytics Systems)
Process	It is used to manage transactions that are happening every day and update the database.	It is used to retrieve the data from OLTP systems and carry analysis over the data.
Data Source	Here OLTP systems are itself the source of the data.	Data to OLAP comes from different OLTP databases.
Need	To run the business seamlessly.	To analyze and predict business, to find out the lacking and booming area in the business and accordingly act.
Insert and Update	Fast and short insertion and updating of user data.	Typically long-running batch jobs take care of data insertion.
Queries	Small and simple queries that take care of Data Processing	Relatively larger and complex queries
Method	It makes use of traditional DBMS system	It makes use of Data Warehouse
Response Time	The response time of OLTP systems is in milliseconds.	Response times of OLAP systems are larger and might vary from seconds to minutes to even hours.
Database Table Normalization	OLTP tables are highly normalized	OLAP systems are typically de-normalized
Access	Read and write both accesses are permitted	Mostly read access is permitted, and rarely write is allowed.
Integrity	OLTP systems are required to maintain data integrity.	Since OLAP systems are not modified very frequently, hence data integrity is not compulsory.
Backup and Recovery	A complete and back for all the databases is required since data availability is very critical in OLTP systems.	OLAP systems are backed on a timely basis and not regular.
Target audience	It is mostly for market insight.	It is for customer insight.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned about the definition of OLTP vs OLAP system with real-world examples and knew the difference between both the systems and where they are used and implemented. Now you are in a position to distinguish between any OLTP and OLAP software and their functionality.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to the top difference between OLTP vs OLAP. Here we also discuss the OLTP vs OLAP key differences with infographics and comparison table. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

1. Data Warehouse vs Data Mart
2. What is OLAP?
3. What is OLTP?
4. Types of OLAP