What is OLTP?
OLTP describes systems that record day-to-day transactions quickly and reliably, such as taking an order or updating a balance.
OLTP explained
An online shop's production database is OLTP: thousands of small operations that insert or change single rows, each of which must be correct immediately.
Running heavy analysis queries directly on an OLTP database can slow the application down, which is one reason analytics often runs on a copy, a read replica or a warehouse.
Example
Saving a new order, reducing stock by one and recording a payment are OLTP operations.
How it differs from similar terms
OLAP systems are optimised for large analytical reads rather than many small writes.