Not sure this is where I should post this, but I found related questions on here, so I'm gonna give it a go:
I've been reading up on data warehousing, OLAP/OLTP etc. One thing I would like to know - and it might be a silly question - what does the "Online" stand for in OLAP/OLTP? I wasn't successful googling it because I only get an answer to the question "What is OLAP?", but the name is never fully explained, it's always about analytical vs transactional.
My own thought was maybe OLTP is "online" in the sense that it does what it does (storing/processing transactional data etc) in real-time and then OLAP just modified that name when it was "invented", but that might be completely wrong.
As opposed to a local copy of data (e.g., a spreadsheet), both these data sources assume there's a remote server somewhere (not necessarily on the internet; could be on an internal network), and there's a communications channel connecting the server to the client.