Databases Demystified Chapter 2 – Analytical vs. Transactional Databases

This blog post by Michael Kaminsky discusses the differences between analytical and transactional databases, which are two major paradigms for working with databases. Analytical workloads involve calculating complex aggregate functions, read-only queries, batch-write loads, and ad-hoc non-routine analyses. Transactional workloads operate on one "object" at a time, perform CRUD operations, manage the state of a database, and support many operations per second with high throughput. Common transactional databases include PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Database. The post emphasizes understanding these different paradigms to make informed choices when selecting database technologies.