OLTP vs OLAP: Transactional vs Analytical Workloads

~10 min read

Why a data warehouse like Redshift is architecturally different from a transactional database, not just 'a bigger database.'

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Key points

  • OLTP: many small fast transactions, low per-query latency matters, row-oriented storage (RDS/Aurora/DynamoDB)
  • OLAP: few large aggregate queries scanning huge row counts, columnar storage and parallel processing matter (Redshift)
  • Running OLAP queries against an OLTP database causes resource contention with live application traffic
  • Standard fix: a data pipeline extracting data into a purpose-built warehouse for analytical workloads