OLTP vs OLAP

Difference Between OLTP vs OLAP

In this topic, we will learn about OLTP vs OLAP and their differences and also explain their advantages and disadvantages with their examples.

Online Transactional Processing (OLTP)

OLAP or Online Transactional Processing systems are used to carry out day to day live transactions that are happening around us. The main focus of OLTP systems is to support Data Processing rather than Data Analysis. A “transaction” is an event that results in the creation, update, deletion or retrieval of the data. In order for Big/Medium companies to carry out their administrative/business or sales tasks, it is compulsory to have OLTP systems in place which 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 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 is having any loyalty cards, and if he uses it, a transaction will happen 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 it, 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)

OLAP or Online Analytical Processing is used to carry out the analysis over the processed data. Typically, while OLTP systems insert the data to a database while the OLAP system is used to analyze those data. But before analyzing, the data needs to be in proper format and so the ETL process over the data is performed i.e. Extract, Transform and Load.

Hence there are very low transactions that are happening at 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 database is in a different format. So before storing them into 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 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 vs OLAP (Infographics)

Below is the top 12 comparison between OLTP vs OLAP:

Advantages And Disadvantages of OLTP vs 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

Conclusion: OLTP vs OLAP

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. AWT vs Swing – Top Differences
4. What is OLTP?