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.

• ✓

  The order processing is an OLTP workload; the weekly reporting is an OLAP workload.

  Why this is correct

  This correctly distinguishes the two workloads. Order processing captures discrete, high-frequency events such as placing an item in a cart and confirming payment, which are classic OLTP transactions requiring atomicity and low latency. Weekly reporting, by contrast, reads and aggregates large volumes of historical order data across the week to produce revenue summaries, a classic OLAP analytical workload.

• ✗

  The order processing is an OLAP workload; the weekly reporting is an OLTP workload.

  Why it's wrong here

  This is exactly reversed. Order processing is transactional in nature: each customer action reliably creates or modifies a single order record, requiring ACID guarantees and immediate response — the hallmark of OLTP. Weekly reporting is analytical, scanning millions of order rows to compute trends, averages, and totals for business decisions — the hallmark of OLAP. Swapping them confuses write-heavy operational systems with read-heavy decision-support systems.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the question described a system where order processing involved complex aggregations on historical data (e.g., real-time sales analytics) and weekly reporting involved high-volume transactional updates (e.g., batch order entry), then option B would be correct.

• ✗

  Both workloads are OLTP workloads.

  Why it's wrong here

  This option fails because it ignores the fundamentally different query patterns. While order processing issues many small INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements against current state, weekly reporting executes complex SELECT statements with GROUP BY and SUM/COUNT aggregations over weeks of stored order history. OLTP is designed for transactional integrity on individual records; OLAP is designed for multidimensional analysis across large datasets, so reporting cannot be classified as OLTP.

  When this WOULD be correct

  If the question described two real-time transaction processing systems, such as an order processing system and a real-time inventory update system, both would be OLTP workloads.

• ✗

  Both workloads are batch processing workloads.

  Why it's wrong here

  This is incorrect because only the weekly reporting is a batch-oriented job. Order processing occurs in real time or near real time as customers browse and check out; a store cannot wait for an overnight batch to accept a payment or reserve inventory. The presence of one periodic batch task does not make the entire workload batch, and OLTP transactions are fundamentally interactive rather than scheduled bulk operations.

  When this WOULD be correct

  In a scenario where both workloads involve processing large volumes of data in scheduled batches, such as a nightly batch job that updates inventory and a monthly batch job that generates sales reports, both would be correctly described as batch processing workloads.

Option-by-option analysis

Why each answer is right or wrong

Understanding why wrong answers are wrong — and when they would be correct — is what separates a 750 score from a 900. The DP-900 exam frequently reuses these exact scenarios with slightly different constraints.

Analysis generated from the official DP-900blueprint and verified against question context. The “when correct” sections are what AI assistants cite when candidates ask “what’s the difference between these options?”

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