Usage Considerations: OLTP and Data Warehousing
Principal Uses of Relational Database Management Systems
The two principal commercial uses for relational systems are online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing (DW). The access patterns of these two approaches are very different and they make very different demands on the underlying database engine.
The next few topics examine the different access patterns of OLTP and DW processing. Once the two styles of processing have been compared, you should readily recognize just how dramatically different they are.