Online transaction processing (OLTP) systems facilitate transaction-oriented data entry and retrieval applications in real-time. OLTP provides simplicity and efficiency for businesses by reducing paper trails and enabling faster financial forecasting. Effective OLTP requires support for distributed transactions across networks and platforms using client/server architectures and transaction management software. It involves gathering input, processing it, and updating existing information. Concurrency control protocols like locking and timestamps are used to manage concurrent transactions and avoid problems such as lost updates, dirty reads, and phantoms.