Business Analyst: What is a data warehouse vs operational database?

Operational DB — day-to-day transactions. Data warehouse — analytical reporting.

Operational Database:

• Current data.
• OLTP (Online Transaction Processing).
• Fast reads/writes.
• Normalized.

Data Warehouse:

• Historical data.
• OLAP (Online Analytical Processing).
• Complex queries.
• Denormalized.

Example:

BA relevance:

• Understand data sources.
• Define reporting requirements.
• Data analysis.