DP-900 Describe core data concepts Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Both workloads are OLTP.

  Why it's wrong here

  Labeling both workloads as OLTP is incorrect because the monthly summary report does not perform transactional operations such as inserts, updates, or deletes on individual records. Instead, it aggregates thousands or millions of historical transaction rows into a summary, which is a read-intensive analytical workload characteristic of OLAP. While the transaction recording system is indeed OLTP, the reporting component's query patterns—scanning large datasets and computing totals—are fundamentally different and require a separate analytical processing model.

• ✓

  The transaction recording is OLTP, and the monthly report is OLAP.

  Why this is correct

  This classification is correct because the two workloads have fundamentally different processing requirements. Recording each online transaction is an OLTP operation: it involves high-frequency, low-latency writes and reads for individual events, with strict ACID guarantees to ensure data integrity. Generating the monthly report, by contrast, is an OLAP operation: it queries large volumes of accumulated transaction data, applies aggregations, and supports business intelligence analysis, often within a data warehouse environment optimized for complex read-only queries.

• ✗

  The transaction recording is OLAP, and the monthly report is OLTP.

  Why it's wrong here

  Reversing the classification is incorrect because it misidentifies the nature of each workload. Capturing individual transactions is a classic OLTP workload—it demands immediate, short-lived operations that insert or update specific rows, with high concurrency and low latency—not the long-running analytical scans typical of OLAP. Conversely, the monthly report summarizes historical data using grouping and aggregation, which is an OLAP pattern; OLTP systems are not designed to efficiently process such large-scale, read-heavy analytical queries.

• ✗

  Both workloads are OLAP.

  Why it's wrong here

  Labeling both as OLAP is incorrect because the transaction recording process is fundamentally an OLTP workload. Each transaction triggers a discrete write (or update) to the operational database, requiring fast, atomic, and isolated processing; such a pattern aligns with OLTP's focus on real-time data capture and integrity. OLAP is meant for complex analytical queries over historical snapshots, typically using multidimensional schemas and columnar storage, which would be inappropriate and inefficient for handling high-frequency individual transactions at a bank's point-of-sale or online banking system.

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