Interview Questions

What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP?

Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers


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What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP?

Main Differences between OLTP and OLAP are:-

1. User and System Orientation

OLTP: customer-oriented, used for data analysis and querying by clerks, clients and IT professionals.

OLAP: market-oriented, used for data analysis by knowledge workers( managers, executives, analysis).

2. Data Contents

OLTP: manages current data, very detail-oriented.

OLAP: manages large amounts of historical data, provides facilities for summarization and aggregation, stores information at different levels of granularity to support decision making process.

3. Database Design

OLTP: adopts an entity relationship(ER) model and an application-oriented database design.

OLAP: adopts star, snowflake or fact constellation model and a subject-oriented database design.

4. View

OLTP: focuses on the current data within an enterprise or department.

OLAP: spans multiple versions of a database schema due to the evolutionary process of an organization; integrates information from many organizational locations and data stores

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