Your applications are probably constantly generating data, and this application data will gradually build up in your database. This historic application data is hugely valuable, and you can use data analytics to glean all sorts of business insights from it.

However, if your database and code are optimised for your day-to-day application (OLTP) activity, they might not be optimised for analytics (OLAP). You’ll typically be running more complex queries, joining data from multiple tables, and working on large data sets.

How can you do this efficiently and make sure you don’t slow down your application? Let’s have a look at some of the tips and tricks you can use, from tweaking configuration parameters to implementing materialized views.