OLTP: Online Transaction and Processing helps and manages applications based on transactions involving high volume of data. Typical example of a transaction is commonly observed in Banks, Air tickets etc. Because OLTP uses client server architecture, it supports transactions to run cross a network.

OLAP: Online analytical processing performs analysis of business data and provides the ability to perform complex calculations on usually low volumes of data. OLAP helps the user gain an insight on the data coming from different sources (multi dimensional).