A library or moving truck
Your database is organized like a library or a moving truck.
The data nerds call it OLTP or OLAP.
But here’s the key idea behind those acronyms.
You can organize your data like books in a library - according to category, genre, author, and/or title. There are advanced systems and sciences for the organization of books. Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, and Bliss Bibliographic are the most common classification systems in the US.
These systems are optimized for finding one specific book, and for quickly and properly archiving a new book that was returned. If you walk into a familiar library with a book in mind you can find it in just a couple minutes or less. The system is designed for hyper-specific selection and organization of books.
In the data world, this is an OLTP system - designed for reading and writing a single individual data point with extreme efficiency.
On the other hand, is a moving truck. Or more specifically, a library moving service. When you are faced with the challenge of moving a library, the goal isn’t individual storage and identification of books. It’s to move thousands (or millions) of books with scale. Yes, the books are still organized, but accessing a particular book when packed in boxes in a moving truck isn’t the most efficient. And it’s not what the system was designed for.
In the data world, this is an OLAP system - designed for reading and aggregating bulk information. This is often used to see trends, and summary information.
Your business needs will dictate how you store your data.
If you are Fedex and have millions of people a day looking up a tracking number for their package - you want OLTP for quick and effective retrieval of a single data point.
If you are financial analyst working on forecasting the next quarter or fiscal year, you aren’t worried about a single data point. You want to see trends and aggregates across categories. Thats OLAP.
It was good to see you today,
Sawyer
p.s. If you need help sorting through how to store your data - or how to do an appropriate mixture of OLTP and OLAP to meet your business needs, hit reply and tell me about it.
