OLTP

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) refers to information systems designed to manage transaction-oriented tasks for day-to-day operations. OLTP systems handle large numbers of short, atomic transactions with the goal of fast response times and high concurrency. Common applications include banking and financial transfers, order processing, inventory management, airline reservations, and point-of-sale systems.

Key characteristics include the ACID properties—Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability—which ensure that each transaction is completed in full or not at all, the database remains consistent, concurrent transactions do not interfere, and changes persist after failures. OLTP databases typically use normalized schemas, fast index access, and robust concurrency control.

Architectures typically rely on relational database management systems (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQL Server), though specialized NoSQL and in-memory solutions may be used for specific workloads. OLTP relies on logging (like write-ahead or redo logs), lock-based or multiversion concurrency control, and transaction managers to ensure atomic commits and recoverability. High availability and disaster recovery are achieved with replication, clustering, backups, and, increasingly, distributed transactions or carefully designed eventually-consistent components when applicable.

Performance considerations focus on minimizing latency and maximizing throughput. Transactions are usually short, with goals of millisecond-level response times, and systems are tuned with indexing, query optimization, connection pooling, caching, and hardware scalability to support many concurrent users.

OLTP is often distinguished from Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). OLTP handles current operational data; OLAP is designed for complex queries on large historical datasets. In practice, data from OLTP systems is periodically loaded into data warehouses for analysis, reporting, and business intelligence.