Designing for OLTP and Designing for Data Warehousing Support
Differences Between OLTP and Data Warehouse Processing
The following table examines some of the principal differences in OLTP and Decision Support processing that are critical to database design:
|
Attribute
|
Processing Type
|
|
|
OLTP Transaction |
Decision Support Query |
|
|
Multiple tables scanned? |
No |
Yes |
|
Large data volumes? |
No |
Yes |
|
Processing intensive? |
No |
Yes |
|
Processing time a function of database size? |
No |
Yes |
As you can see from this side-by-side comparison, OLTP transactions and decision support queries are dramatically different entities and, by inference, might be expected to require physically different database support.