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Data & Analytics · Foundational

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)

Systems that handle many short, concurrent read and write transactions, such as orders, payments and bookings.

Definition

OLTP databases are normalized, row-oriented and optimized for fast single-row inserts, updates and lookups with strong ACID guarantees. Running heavy analytics directly on them can hurt operational performance, which is why data is copied to warehouses.

Example

An e-commerce checkout database.

Exam tip

OLTP = many small writes, normalized, current data. OLAP = large reads, denormalized, historical data.

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