In: Computer Science
Describe a business situation in which you would want to choose OLAP over OLTP or OLTP over OLAP. How would you describe the purpose and advantages of one over the other?
Let us first consider the use case of OLAP
OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing . It is a group of software tools which are mainly used for analytical purposes of a buisness solution.
OLAP applications will store informations from multiple databases in a warehouse and apply analytiacal tools on this warehouse datas. It actually handles historical data.For example, suppose an organization needs to find how customers buy their products and needs to analyze what can be done to increase the sales . Then the organization needs to apply the analytical tools. So it will collect purchase history of users from various databases and process it. In such kind of buisness solutions use of OLTP is not encouraged. Because , OLTP databases are used for continuous transaction like normal fetch , update operations on database. It does not support advanced analytical tools. Also , an OLAP can handle datas from variety of databases but for an OLTP datas are of almost same type.
Now coming to OLTP
OLTP stands for online Transaction processing . It consist of only current data . These datas are used for day to day applications . For example , an Online Banking system is an example of an OLTP application. OLTP is capable of handling the ACID properties.
It is important to note here that OLTP is optimized for transactions instead of data analysis.For example , assume a couple has a joint account in a bank . Suppose , both of them have done an online banking simultaneously to transfer some amout the online banking system should make sure that withdrawn amount will not be greater than the current balance.
Normally , large organizations store datas for day to day operations on OLTP and historical datas for analytical processes in OLAP.