business analytics

1. Chapter 3
On-Line Transaction
Processing (OLTP)

2. Outline
• Queries that an OLTP system can process
• Advantages of an OLTP system
• Challenges of an OLTP system
• The queries that OLTP cannot answer
• Data Model for OLTP

3. OLTP
• OLTP systems refer to a class of systems that
manage transaction-oriented applications.
• These applications are mainly concerned with the
entry, storage, and retrieval of data.
• They are designed to cover most of the day-to-
day operations of an organization such as
purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, payroll,
accounting, etc.
• Definition : Transaction system that is primarily
responsible for capturing and storing data related
to day-to-day business functions.

4. OLTP
• OLTP systems are characterized by a large
number of short on-line transactions such as
– INSERT (a new customer added to the database),
– UPDATE (the prise of a product has been raised
from $10 to $10.5),
– DELETE ( a product has gone out of demand and
therefore removed)

5. OLTP
• Almost all industries today (including airlines,
mail-order, supermarkets, banking, insurance,
etc.) use OLTP systems to record transactional
data.
• The data captured by OLTP systems is usually
stored in commercial relational databases.

6. OLTP
• For example, the database of a supermarket
store consists of the following tables to store
the data about its:
– Transactions
– ProductMaster
– EmployeeDetails
– InventorySupplies
– Suppliers

7. Queries that an OLTP system can process
ProductID ProductName ProductDescription UnitPrice QtyInStock
P101 Glucon D Energy Drink 1.75 250
P102 Boost Energy Drink 1.50 300
P103 Maxwell DVD DVD 0.80 500
P104 Poison Perfume 125 50
P105 Reynolds Pen 0.65 125
P106 Maggi Sauce Tomato Sauce 1.40 250
A few sample records of the ProductMaster table

8. Queries that an OLTP system can
process
• Search for a particular customer’s record
• Retrieve the product description and unit
price of a particular product
• Filter all products with a unit price equal to or
above $25
• Filter all products supplied by a particular
supplier
• Search and display the record of a particular
supplier

9. Advantages of an OLTP system
• Simplicity:
– It is designed typically for use by clerks, cashiers,
clients, etc.
• Efficiency:
– It allows its users to read, write, and delete data
quickly
• Fast query processing
– It responds to user actions immediately and also
supports transaction processing on demand

10. Challenges of an OLTP system
• Security:
– An OLTP system requires concurrency control
(locking) and recovery mechanisms (logging)
• OLTP system data content not suitable for
decision making:
– A typical OLTP system manages the current data
within an enterprise/organization. This current
data is far too detailed to be easily used for
decision making.

11. The queries that OLTP cannot answer
• Cannot handle complex queries, for example:
The supermarket store is deciding on introducing a
new product. The key questions they are debating
are:
– “Which product should they introduce?” and
– “should it be specific to a few customer
segments?”

12. The queries that OLTP cannot answer
The supermarket store is looking at offering some
discount on their year-end sale. The questions here
are:
– “how much discount should they offer?” and
– “should different discounts be given to different
customer segments?”

13. The queries that OLTP cannot answer
The supermarket is looking at rewarding its most
consistent salesperson. The question here is:
– “how to zero in on its most consistent salesperson
(consistent on several parameters)”

14. Data model for OLTP
• Entity Relationship (ER) data model

15. What is OLTP? - Oracle
• https://www.oracle.com/database/what-is-
oltp/