Understanding Online Transaction Processing


OLAP applications are designed for data analysis. However, OLAP applications are not designed for recording the business transactions that make up the data. On the other hand, online transaction processing (OLTP) applications are designed for recording business transactions, but OLTP applications are not designed for data analysis. In this sense, OLAP and OLTP software applications complement each other and both types of applications are the foundation of sound data collection and data analysis systems.

It’s easy to understand why OLTP software is important to a good data- gathering strategy. You know that every time you purchase goods or services, you participate in a sales transaction. For legal auditing purposes, every sales transaction must have a set of data, or business facts, associated with it. Often, sellers record the following facts about their sales transactions:

  • Some portion of the buyer’s personal information, such as a preferred customer number, a phone number, a name, and so on.

  • Some portion of the seller’s information, such as the location where the sale was made, the location’s phone number and address, and so on.

  • General information about the goods or services sold—descriptions, quantities purchased, the price charged per item.

  • Whether the item was taxable, whether any discounts were applied, the payment type (cash, personal check, credit card), and so on.

  • The date and time the sale was made.

To ensure that sales transactions are recorded in the least amount of time possible, OLTP applications are used to enable quick data entry. For instance, in most retail preferred-customer programs, a cashier asks for just the customer’s phone number or requires the customer to swipe a preferred-customer card through a card reader. The phone number can be used to locate the customer’s information, or the card’s magnetic strip might contain all the information. If the cashier had to ask every person in line for their customer information before they could qualify for special purchase offers or discounts, many customers would probably stop doing business with that organization because of the inconvenience.

Likewise, a good OLTP software system can associate data with transactions when it needs to cross-reference sales prices, sales tax rates, applicable discounts, and so on. OLTP systems are important for any business or industry in which transactions are necessary, and when you think about it, finding a business or industry that does not record transactions of some type is pretty hard.

The reason that OLTP is an important counterpart to OLAP is that many organizations try to use the software applications they have to do too many data collection, storage, and analysis tasks that the applications weren’t designed for. Most data collection and storage software applications cannot devote precious computer processing time to serve as data analysis systems, and almost all data analysis systems cannot handle the sheer volume of real- time transactions that need to be entered by data-entry workers.

For effective data collection, storage, and analysis computer systems, you need a combination of OLTP and OLAP software applications, and the tools to analyze the data:

  • Excel is considered to be one of the best software applications for data analysis. It is not considered either an OLTP or OLAP solution, but it can be used to analyze OLAP data, as you’ll see in the next chapter.

  • Microsoft Data Analyzer is optimized for analyzing OLAP data, but it can’t be used as either an OLTP or an OLAP system when it comes to collection or storage.

  • Access can serve as a lightweight OLTP system, but it is not considered an OLAP solution.

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is regarded as an ideal OLTP solution, but it alone is not considered an OLAP solution.

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services is considered the premier OLAP solution, but it cannot serve as an OLTP system.

For more information about OLTP systems, see Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Books Online, which is included with the product.




Accessing and Analyzing Data With Microsoft Excel
Accessing and Analyzing Data with Microsoft Excel (Bpg-Other)
ISBN: 073561895X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 137
Authors: Paul Cornell

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