Event files and business integration (was Re: Monitoring a file for changes from Java?)

Does anybody here have any business integration experience?

My file monitoring experiment has an ultimate goal of developing part of a
business integration adaptor, the part that handles outgoing events.

I'm faced with a decision, though:

If I put complete record images into the event file, the event file
records could become quite large. As in multiple kilobytes apiece.
Especially if, for whatever reason, we keep both before and after images.
And even after the event has been passed on to the business integration
server, we're still stuck with a huge record in the event archive. But if
I put record keys in, instead, I end up with the following potential
scenario:

Suppose the outgoing-event-processing thread is handling a flurry of
events. Event 23 involves a change in field FOO of record 47 from a value
of BAR to a value of BAZ, while Event 42 changes FOO of record 47 from BAZ
to QUX. Suppose further that Event 42 occurs before the thread has gotten
to Event 23. If we have a complete record image in the event file, then we
capture both the BAR-to-BAZ transition from Event 23, and the BAZ-to-QUX
transition from Event 42. But if we only have keys in the event file, then
we end up seeing the results of Event 42 twice.

Am I straining at gnats here?

--
JHHL