What does TPC-D mean by “Decision Support”?
Decision Support is a term used to describe the capability of a system to support the formulation of business decisions through complex queries against a database. It can also specifically refer to a database which is intended for this purpose, as opposed to one which primarily supports on-line transaction processing operations. Decision Support is different from OLTP. OLTP applications are update-intensive and generally consist of shorter transactions that access a small portion of a database, often through a primary key or index. Decision support applications typically consist of long and often complex read-only queries that access large portions of the database. Decision support databases are updated relatively infrequently, either by periodic batch runs, or by background “trickle” update streams.
