AW: Modernizing applications

Hi,

some years ago we had to pay a lot of money, because of the lack of
journaling and commitment control (and because my colleague did not save the
data before updating them with SQL).

Friday evening, 5.30 pm we were already prepared for the week-end. Then a
client called! "Could you please remove these blabla records from my stock
of inventory."
No problem, my colleague logged in and typed the SQL statement, but missed
something or wrote > instead of < or something like this. Immediately after
pressing enter he saw his mistake, but even though he cancelled the query
immediately a few hundred rows were deleted.

... the only way to restore the data was to take stock! Fortunately it was
Friday and the client normally did not work at the week end!
... but in either way we had to pay for the stocktaking (which was not very
cheap).

With journaling and commitment control, the data could have been resettet
with a simple ROLLBACK.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best regards

Birgitta Hauser

"Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." (Les
Brown)
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." (Derek Bok)
"What is worse than training your staff and losing them? Not training them
and keeping them!"


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Im Auftrag von Jerry Adams
Gesendet: Thursday, 20. August 2009 22:39
An: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Betreff: RE: Modernizing applications

<snip>
In 29 years of working with the i and its predecessors I have done an
unplanned full restore once and lost a handfull of transactions (< 5).
</snip>

My boss told me that, before I came to work here, he accidentally cleared
our order details file. (How one can do that accidentally is a mystery to
me, but I digress.)

Everyone in the office spent the rest of the day re-entering the orders from
printed picking tickets.

As I said before, I am not a journaling expert (or even novice), but
wouldn't journaling be of no benefit in such situations? I.e., it seems to
me that the journal would simply said something along the lines of "Order
123 deleted" ad nauseum. Applying the journals would result in nothing
being recovered. Or is there a rollback option, such as "Roll the Order
Details back to its state at Noon."?


Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
--
B&W Wholesale
office: 615-995-7024
email: jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx