Assignment 1 OLTP VS OLAP

  Please find the attached document for the exercise

Business Case

Robert Jones is a manager of several Sales Organizations at Global Bike Inc. His responsibilities are to monitor and manage sales activities. He has a number of systems to assist with the recording of day-to-day transactions, and at the end of each month he is provided with a report which displays each sale. The format of the report is illustrated below. Although this report provides a lot of information, the information is not in a format that can easily assist in the type of decisions he is required to make. The sales data is delivered by the IT Department in the following format:

The primary purpose of an information system is to process information to produce reports to facilitate decision making. Reports may appear in various formats and used to support a diverse range of organizational decisions. Reports provide a mechanism for organizing, analyzing, presenting and delivering information to end users. A common classification of reports is based on the types of systems which they are built from. On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems as the name suggests are optimized for transaction processing. They process real time information and are accessed by many users. The reports are derived from the various business transactions and predominately support tactical decision making.

An alternative information system is On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). This type of processing allows users to analyze information by creating multidimensional reports. They deal with large volumes of aggregated historical data. OLAP based reports are more flexible than the more traditional reports produced by an OLTP system. 

As mentioned previously OLTP reports provide information about particular transactions. 

The flexibility of OLAP reporting assists end users in understanding why particular business events have occurred and or forecast what may occur in the future. OLAP systems and their ability for multi-dimensional reporting are considered an important component of Business Intelligence. OLTP systems often provide the transactional data which is used as an input for OLAP system’s multi-dimensional reports.

Your task is to suggest to Robert Jones what type of systems (OLTP or OLAP) he can use to find answers to these questions:

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Process

Systems (OLTP or OLAP)

1

Who purchased a particular product?

2

How much did an employee get paid?

3

How many of a product was manufactured?

4

What   are the total sales for each product? 

5

What   are the total sales for each department?

6

Which   salesperson has sold the most?

7

Which   products does each salesperson sell the most of?

8

In   which month did most of the sales occur?

9

Which customer   spent the least amount of money in February? 

10

Which customer   spent the most in February and which sales person was responsible for the   majority of these sales?