Understanding OLTP and OLAP

OLTP and OLAP are relatively new, but important, fields. They involve the financial transactions performed over a network, such as shopping or banking transactions. To be clear, these are a kind of automated observation and often include a pipeline such as ETL or ELT, but are considered their own categories because financial data is protected. Some guidelines must be followed for OLTP and OLAP that are not required for other types of data. Specific guidelines on protected data will be covered later in this book.

OLTP

OLTP is the act of automatically storing and processing data from online transactions. To be clear, that means that every time you purchase something online, the record is automatically collected, stored, and processed through OLTP. More often than not, this process uses a snowflake schema, as discussed in Chapter 2, Data Structures, Types, and Formats. There are specific safeguards involved with OLTP, such as making sure that if some...