OLTP(online transaction processing) database

Is used for online shopping, billing, customer applications.

OLTP has heavy transaction volume like millions of customers shopping on Amazon.
But the transactions are smaller transactions, runs for few milli seconds.
It is Highly Normalized.
It has heavy Inserts so number of Indexes should be minimized.
OLTP system keeps only last 3-6 months of data in the database. Older data is mo
ved into Datawarehouse which retains data for 10-20 years depending on Business
requirement.
Must be available 24/7/365 and has short maintenace intervals.
Datawarehouse/DSS(Decision Support System) Database
Are huge databases and used for Reporting purpose.
It is Highly Denormalized to optimize the sql queries. Has many Indexes to optim
ize the sql performance.
A datawarehouse query runs against huge data(10-20 years data). e.g Finding out
what City/State has most/least Sale of a Product in last 5 years. Based on these
analysis Marketing/Sales can focus on a specific City/State.
Datawarehouse Transactions are bigger but transaction volume is lesser.
Online Transaction Processing and Decision-Support
System Databases
Online transaction processing databases are the bread and butter of most consume
r- and supplier oriented
databases. This category includes order entry, billing, customer, supplier, and
supply-chain
databases. These databases are characterized by and a need to be online
continuously, which today (given the use of the Internet to access such systems)
means 24/7/365
availability, short maintenance intervals, and low tolerance for breakdowns in t
he system.
Decision-support systems range from small databases to large data warehouses. Th
ese are
typically not 24/7 operations, and they can easily manage with regularly schedul
ed downtime and
maintenance windows. The extremely large size of some of these data warehouses n
ecessitates the
use of special techniques both to load and to use the data.
There isn t a whole lot of difference between the administration of a DSS-oriented
data warehouse
and a transaction-oriented OLTP system from the DBA s perspective. The backup and
recovery
methodology is essentially the same, and database security and other related iss
ues are also very
similar.
The big difference between the two types of databases occurs at the design and i
mplementation
stages.
DSS systems usually involve a different optimization strategy for queries and di
fferent

physical storage strategies. Oracle Database 11g provides you with the choice of
implementing an
OLTP database or a DSS database using the same database server software.
Performance design considerations that may work well with one type of database m
ay be
entirely inappropriate for another type of database. For example, a large number
of indexes can help
you query a typical data warehouse efficiently while you are getting some report
s out of that database.
If you have the same number of indexes on a live OLTP system with a large number
of concurrent
users, you may see a substantial slowing down of the database, because the many
updates, inserts,
and deletes on the OLTP system require more work on the part of the database.