SQL Server performance tips: OLAP vs. OLTP

You should consider OLTP systems and OLAP systems to be mutually exclusive environments. Never try to incorporate elements of both into a single database or into different database running on a signle server. If you do, your OLTP operations will have a negative performance on OLAP functions, and vice versa. This is because the two types of systems have different goals, different designs, and different optimization and tuning measures. For one example, OLTP systems should be normalized as much as possile, while the reverse is true for OLAP systems. Always used different databases for OLTP and OLAP systems, even if they represent the same underlying data.