Operational systems are optimized to preserve the data integrity of the system, whereas data warehouse are optimized to speed up the process of data analysis.

Operational system increases the speed of the business transactions through the use of normalization of the database and using the entity relationship models, whereas data warehouse uses de-normalization and dimension based model to speed the data retrieval.

Operational system uses relational databases to maintain the relationship between the tables. It also consists of insert and update process that takes very less time hence increment in the performance of the system to create the transaction. Whereas, data warehouse store the same data multiple times to keep the aggregation of the data and gather the data from the operational systems.