Introduction Every time you buy a coffee with a card, "like" a post on social media, withdraw money from an ATM or buy a shirt online, you are interacting with a database. Behind the scenes of every app and website, data is constantly being created, moved, stored and read. However, not all data storage is the same. The way a system stores your checkout items at a grocery store is very different from the way that same grocery chain analyzes ten years of sales trends. To understand how modern software handles data, we need to look at two main types of storage; traditional databases and data warehouses . Within these systems, there are two distinct ways of processing information: OLTP and OLAP . If you are not a computer guru, these terms might sound very technical but they are not as complex as they sound. But once you break them down, they make perfect sense. This article gives a simple but detailed breakdown of what these are, how they work, and why software relies on both.…