OLTP (Online Transaction Processing)

OLTP — online transaction processing — is the workload of systems that run the business: placing orders, updating balances, booking seats. Its shape is many small, concurrent operations touching individual records, where correctness and speed of single-row reads and writes are everything. OLTP databases use normalized schemas precisely to make those writes safe and non-redundant.

Its counterpart, OLAP, is the workload of systems that analyse the business — few, large, read-heavy queries scanning millions of rows. The two shapes conflict in one engine, which is why operational data is replicated into a warehouse or lakehouse for analytics instead of being analysed in place.

Go deeper: OLTP vs OLAP: Why You Shouldn't Run Analytics on Your App Database