| OLTP | OLAP |
Organization | It uses workflow per application | It uses dimension and business subject |
Data Retention | Short term (2 - 6 months) | Long term (2 - 5 years) |
Database Design and Storage | - The design in OLTP is highly normalized. - Gigabytes | - The design is typically de-normalized and contains fewer tables - Terabytes |
Data Integration | Minimal or none | High, as part of ETL process |
Application | - Real time (short and fast inserts and updates) - write & update - Transactional data - controlling and running fundamental business tasks | - Batch load (includes periodic long-running batch jobs that refresh the data) - Reporting, read-only - Spiked usage - Planning, problem solving and decision support |
Adavnatges | - Involves standardized and simple queries that return few records hence, it is faster - A large number of short on-line transaction | - Involves complex queries along with aggregations that return a huge amount of data. - OLAP applications are widely used by Data Mining techniques. |