Modern Databases
Modern database management systems are constantly evolving because the market demands new features. Current trends in database technology focus on two areas – Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) databases.
An OLTP database supports what we know as the “day-to-day” tasks of business. OLTP database support highly concurrent systems that add, change, and delete data. An OLAP database supports the underlying data that Data Analyst use to make decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) describes the data analysts’ world, and BI relies on OLAP databases to support and house data. OLAP supports concurrent systems that only query data.
An OLAP database is a data warehouse when it contains large amounts of data to support a variety of decision-making. An OLAP database is a data mart when it contains a highly specialized data to help identify specific decision-making.
Day-to-day business operations typically run on relational database management systems (RDBMS). That’s because they’re designed to support high concurrency with and frequent data changes. Data changes come from INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements, which respectively add, change, and remove data from a database.
The RDBMS is not the only solution available. Some companies choose to implement distributed systems, like Cassandra. Other companies choose to implement document-oriented databases, like MongoDB. You can describe a document-centered database as a content management database.
You also can implement an XML databases as a content management database. Mark Logic is an XML database. XML databases offer highly concurrent and query-only databases. They are effective alternatives to traditional OLAP solutions. XML databases are ideally suited solutions when we don’t know what we want to discover because they use XPath to find new relationships between data.
A database management system is generally suited to a single purpose. Unfortunately, sometimes organizations don’t have enough money to fund separate OLTP and OLAP databases. These companies often implement an RDBMS database to handle both the OLTP and OLAP needs. The database generally under performs its OLTP to deliver a qualified OLAP system and vice versa.
