OLTP versus OLAP

OLTP serves many small transactions for users in milliseconds; OLAP runs a few huge analytical queries over history. Running analytics on the production database slows down users, so the two are separated.

Where it shows up in real systems

  • Data warehouse

    Built for large analytical queries that take seconds, not for serving users. Placing it in a request path destroys latency; feed it asynchronously through a pipeline instead.

    In production: Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, ClickHouse, Databricks SQL

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