OLAP (vs OLTP), is a columnar data-store and are optimized for analytics. Some OLAP DB’s are data warehouses derived from several OLTP DB’s through an ETL.
- Primarily used by Business Analyst’s and not by end users
- These handle a lower volume of queries but each query is demanding
- Disk bandwidth is the bottleneck here
- Here, we need to encode the data compactly (column compression using techniques like bit mapping) to minimize the amount that a query needs to read from disk