So far in this book, we have discussed models used to build operational systems. Operational systems implement real-time transactions that manipulate the system’s data and orchestrate its day-to-day interactions with its environment. These models are the online transactional processing (OLTP) data. Another type of data that deserves attention and proper modeling is online analytical processing (OLAP) data.

In this chapter, you will learn about the analytical data management architecture called data mesh. You will see how the data mesh–based architecture works and how it differs from the more traditional OLAP data management approaches. Ultimately, you will see how domain-driven design and data mesh accommodate each other. But first, let’s see what these analytical data models are and why we can’t just reuse the operational models for analytical use cases.