Is snowflake OLTP (Online Transactional Processing) or OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)?
Snowflake is developed as an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) database system, not as an OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database system. In OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), data is collected, stored, and processed from real-time transactions, but in OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), complex queries are used to evaluate aggregated historical data from OLTP systems. Snowflake is not designed to handle much updating and inserting of small amounts of data like a transactional database would.
Snowflake, for instance, cannot handle referential integrity because, even though it supports integrity and other constraints, they are not enforced except the NOT NULL constraint that is always enforced. Other constraints than NOT NULL are created as disabled constraints. However, depending on the use, we may also use it for online transaction processing (OLTP).
