04. OLAP vs OLTP

Note - Correction from video:

At the 1:04 mark of the video, the instructor mistakenly says:

• "OLTP queries will have little aggregations really, if any, while OLTP will heavily focus on aggregations."

The instructor misspoke here. The CORRECT statement is:

• "OLTP queries will have little aggregations really, if any, while OLAP will heavily focus on aggregations."

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP):

Databases optimized for these workloads allow for complex analytical and ad hoc queries, including aggregations. These type of databases are optimized for reads.

Online Transactional Processing (OLTP):

Databases optimized for these workloads allow for less complex queries in large volume. The types of queries for these databases are read, insert, update, and delete.

The key to remember the difference between OLAP and OLTP is analytics (A) vs transactions (T). If you want to get the price of a shoe then you are using OLTP (this has very little or no aggregations). If you want to know the total stock of shoes a particular store sold, then this requires using OLAP (since this will require aggregations).

Additional Resource on the difference between OLTP and OLAP:

This Stackoverflow post describes it well.

Note: We will also be going more in depth with OLAP vs OLTP in Course 3. Cloud Data Warehouses