Database - Data Warehousing - Discussion

Operational systems are generally designed to support high-volume transaction processing with minimal back-end reporting.

Data within operational systems are generally updated regularly according to need.

Based on this fundamental difference, data usage patterns associated with operational systems are significantly different than usage patterns associated with data warehousing systems. As a result, data warehousing systems are designed and optimized using methodologies that drastically differ from that of operational systems.

Operational system in datawarehouse are normally "relational" - not "dimensional". They are designed for operational, data entry purposes and are not well suited for online queries and analytics.

Operational system are process oriented. i.e) focused on specific business process or some other task. It stores current data only.

But the data warehouse stores both current and historical data.

An Operational System is a system that is used daily (perhaps constantly) to perform routine operations - part of the normal business processes.

An operational system is a term used in data warehousing to refer to a system that is used to process the day-to-day transactions of an organization. These systems are designed so processing of day-to-day transactions is performed efficiently and the integrity of the transactional data is preserved.