As you already know, we currently live in the era of data revolution. This represented a paradigm shift a few years ago for organizations that had to stop making gut-feeling decisions and move towards decision-making based on data, information, and knowledge. This pyramid of competitiveness of organizations requires exhaustive management of database relationships and a dynamic understanding of the needs of stakeholders, the company, and consumers.
At this point, the importance of customer database administration arises. The management of software systems is a fundamental pillar of an organization, and other data-centered activities need to have one thing in common: correctly managed databases. A database is understood as a set of data that is organized for a specific use, related to a particular matter or purpose.
To illustrate its importance, we’d like to let you know that at Huenei we work with large databases with information from various areas: customers, suppliers, partners, financial information, and logistics, among others. The interrelationships between various tables in our database allow us to efficiently manage our business. Additionally, we have worked on many database-powered software systems implementation projects for our clients. We’ll tell you about some concrete examples later.
Main types of databases for your business.
We can find different natures of databases in terms of their structure, their operation, and feeding. However, a large majority of them can be compressed into two broad categories that can be the key to managing your business databases.
On-Line Transactional Processing (OLTP)
They are transactional databases, designed to load and access your data quickly. This kinds of database relationships means that they are used for the rapid sending and receiving of your organization’s data. A typical example could be when you send money to a provider’s bank account to make a payment.
Surely you have heard of some of the main OLTP products. But did you already know they are OLTP? Let’s review some of them…
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). It is an integrated information system that covers all the business functions of a company: purchases, payments, provisioning, stock… They pursue the objective of optimizing business processes, allowing access to information in a reliable and timely manner, and facilitating the possibility of sharing information among all participants in a business process. We have developed different ERP products, such as the work we carried out for ABB, for whom we work in the development of a portal to manage and distribute information among different business areas.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This is about a strategy and work methodology to achieve better relationships with clients, based on the client as the center of the strategy. To do this, it relies on information systems and databases that facilitate the process. Some time ago we developed a web application with CRM functionalities to manage a pharmacovigilance system for Novartis.
On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)
They are analytical databases, which allow the reading of large amounts of data to get to extract some type of useful information, such as sales trends, behavior patterns, waste analysis, complex logistics reports, etc. Their objective is to speed up the query of large amounts of data and extract useful information.
The master and exemplary case of OLAP is the famous Business Intelligence (BI). We have already talked about the importance of BI in strategic management, but from a database and software perspective, we understand it as computer applications that interpret historical data, analyze trends and measure performance aimed at serving as support to decision-making. An example that we would like to tell you is our recent work done for Edenor. We developed a software product that helped them optimize the company’s data analysis system, seeking to achieve a daily curve of the demanded energy by area.
OLTP vs. OLAP:
| OLTP | OLAP | |
| Aim | Facilitate fast data insertion. | Facilitate high-performance queries at high speeds. |
| Function | Store transactions at a high level of detail. | Consolidate data in an automatic and optimal way. |
| Orientation | Transaction processing. | Analytical processing. |
| Temporality | Current or recent data. | Long-term data. |
| Format | Areas may not be integrated. | Integration of the entire organization. |
Does your company already use OLTP and OLAP databases? Now you know that these can bring great benefits to your organization. We invite you to read some of our case studies so that you can see more concrete examples of projects that we have carried out for our clients. At Huenei we have extensive experience in the development of software products for data management and analysis and we would like to be able to help your organization achieve its business objectives using data.