OLTP vs. OLAP: Data Processing Patterns

Article #37 of System Design Roadmap series, Part II: Data Storage

Last week, I received an urgent call from a former student who had joined a major e-commerce platform. "The analytics queries are crashing our product database," she explained. "The VP wants real-time sales insights, but each time the analytics team runs their reports, our checkout system slows to a crawl." Her team had fallen into a common trap: using the same database architecture for two fundamentally different data processing patterns. This story illustrates why understanding OLTP vs. OLAP isn't just academic—it can be the difference between a responsive system and a critical outage.

Core Concepts: Two Processing Worlds