OLTP and OLAP Serve Different Purposes
OLTP and OLAP systems both store data, right? Can't you use a lakehouse or a warehouse as your transactional database? I don't believe that’s wise. Each is fundamentally designed and optimized for different types of workloads. That said, there are Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) solutions like Azure Synapse or Snowflake Unistore that blur the lines. Even the Columnstore index in SQL Server represents a hybrid analytics blend.
Maybe a simple way to think about the two systems is:
OLAP = Analysis (Heavy reads & aggregations on large volumes of data)
OLTP = Actions (Writes and reads small amounts of data frequently)
These two bullets aren’t perfect, so I’m open to suggestions for improving them.
