RE: Triggers or Journals?

I love journals.  I have used them since S38 days.  After you have done an
extract for reporting or whatever for the first time, then the rest are
just clones of that one.  If you plan them correctly, then they are a great
resource for reporting purposes or tracking problems or historical
archives.  Many times I have found that elusive program bug, by tracking
the entries from the journal.

My one experience with triggers was not good.  We tried to use them to
create error logs for date checking during one of our yr2000
implementations.  We had a batch update which ran at night, so we removed
the trigger just before running it and then added it back afterwards;
because the added overhead of the trigger increased runtime considerably.
Of course one night our nightly processing got held up, and the next
morning they tried to let everything finish. The person releasing the jobs
did not understand how triggers worked, so they released this batch update.
Of course by then people were already in online programs using the files,
and so the remove trigger would not work.  Needless to say, the batch
program ran all morning.  I removed the triggers permanently and came up
with another plan to check our dates.  Perhaps we were using triggers
incorrectly in this situation, but we haven't tried them since.

Valene M. Williamson
IBM Certified Specialist
vwilliamson@glazers.com
972-448-8018

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