Operational database vs. analytical database

In every organization, information serves two purposes: operational record-keeping and analytical decision-making. Operational systems store operational data, such as taking online orders, resolving customer tickets, and collecting website traffic. Data is generated and continually updated in real-time as the business proceeds.

Operational databases, also known as Online transaction processing databases (OLTP), are optimized for processing transactions and providing the best application performance to users. A common practice is to store only the most recent state of objects without keeping the history. Additionally, operational databases extensively use normalized 3NF structures because an update or insert transaction only affects one table in the database.

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