Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

OLTP

• OLTP stands for Online Transaction Processing.
• OLTP is a software program that supports high transaction – oriented applications.
• It is used for processing the system that responds immediately to the user requests.
• OLTP system is used for data entry, financial transactions, customer relationship management (CRM) and retail sales.
• It is technically difficult to build.
• This system is characterized by a large number of short online transactions like Insert, Update, Delete.
• It provides fast query processing, maintaining data integrity in multi-access environments.
• It includes detailed information about current data and schema used to store transactional databases in the entity model.
• It provides a flexible platform for many applications like from ATM networks to computerized shop floor automation.

Benefits of OLTP

• OLTP reduces paper work.
• It is faster and more accurate forecast for revenues and expenses.
• It makes things simpler for businesses.
• It handles large data, user volumes, more complex calculations and higher peak loads.

OLAP

• OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing.
• It is a powerful technology for data discovery.
• It performs multidimensional analysis of business data.
• It provides the capability for complex calculations, trend analysis and sophisticated data modeling.
• It has the ability to achieve fast access to shared multidimensional information.
• It has the ability to create very fast aggregations and calculations of data sets.

1. MOLAP

• MOLAP stands for Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing.
• It is the classical form of OLAP and stores the data in an optimized multi-dimensional array storage.

• MOLAP is very compact for low dimension data sets.
• It has an effective data extraction achieved through the pre-structuring of aggregated data.
• It performs automated computation of higher level aggregation of the data.
• It performs fast query operation due to optimized storage, multidimensional indexing and caching.

• MOLAP comes with data redundancy.
• Sometimes the processing step can be lengthy, especially on large data.

2. ROLAP

• ROLAP stands for Relational Online Analytical Processing.
• It works with relational databases.
• ROLAP depends on specialized schema design.
• It has the ability to drill down to the lowest level in the database.

3. HOLAP

• HOLAP stands for Hybrid Online Analytical Processing.
• It uses relational tables to hold the larger quantities of detailed data.
• It uses specialized storage for some aspects of the smaller quantities of more-aggregate or less-detailed data.
• It can utilize both pre-calculated cubes and relational data sources.

Advantages of OLAP

• OLAP increases the productivity of business managers, developers and the whole organization.
• It enables managers to solve the problems.
• It controls the access to strategic information for more effective decision making.
• It reduces the application backlog because of faster delivery of applications.
• It enables the organization to respond more quickly to market demands.
• It enables user to analyze multidimensional data interactively from multiple perspectives.
• It does not require large data warehouse.
• OLAP makes easy to produce analytic measures, including time-series calculations, financial models, forecasts, allocations, regressions, etc.

Difference between OLTP and OLAP