What is the difference between OLTP and OLAP?

Answer

OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) handles many short, concurrent transactions like orders, payments, and updates, optimized for fast writes and row-level access with normalized schemas. OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) supports complex analytical queries over large historical datasets, optimized for aggregation and reads, often using columnar storage and denormalized or star schemas. In short, OLTP runs the business in real time while OLAP analyzes it. Data is typically moved from OLTP systems into OLAP systems such as data warehouses through ETL or ELT pipelines.