OLTP Workloads and Exadata Features

Before jumping into an examination of the features and functionality of the Exadata Database Machine as it relates to OLTP, we should start by reviewing some of the key aspects of both OLTP and Exadata software.

The first thing to discuss is the nature of OLTP workloads themselves. OLTP stands for Online Transaction Processing, a description that refers to the core nature of OLTP systems. OLTP systems are used to handle the tactical operations of an organization, that is transactions where data is written to and updated in the database on an ongoing basis. Although data is also written to data warehouses, that data input is traditionally in the form of some type of batch activity, while the write activity in an OLTP system comes in a large number of smaller transactions. Because of this, OLTP workloads typically have a higher number of database operations with a smaller data payload, and the performance emphasis is on the responsiveness of the dat....