RE: Triggers or Journals?

[Chris Bipes <chris.bipes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a good topic.

First the advantage of journals are:

1. They can be setup to automatically be maintained by the OS.

2. There is no programming involved in trapping the history.

3. They open up the possibility of commitment control and ease data
recovery.

Disadvantage of journals:

1. They are hard to report off from.

2. You cannot perform ad hoc queries without first extracting to some sort
of data base.

3. They log all changes regardless of the need.

The advantage of triggers:

1. They can be written to capture only the changes needed thus reducing
storage requirements.

2. They can be written to write to a data base file that can be ad hoc
queried.

Disadvantage of triggers:

1. You must write procedures to purge/archive the audit files.

2. When the business needs change, you may not have captured the required
data, therefore have no history.


I was also thinking along the line of triggers can hand off additional
process to batch/server jobs, thus removing the processing from interactive
jobs, but so can journals.  You can send/receive journal entries in a near
real time fashion.


Does any one else have any thing else to add?

Christopher K. Bipes    mailto:ChrisB@Cross-Check.com
Sr. Programmer/Analyst  mailto:Chris_Bipes@Yahoo.com
CrossCheck, Inc.        http://www.cross-check.com
6119 State Farm Drive   Phone: 707 586-0551 x 1102
Rohnert Park CA  94928  Fax: 707 586-1884





-----Original Message-----
From: BillsVilla@aol.com [mailto:BillsVilla@aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 7:07 PM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Triggers or Journals?


I would like to here some opinions which is best to use for keeping an audit

log of changes that take place to a file. I am curious which way would be 
best and would like to some pros and cons. 

Thanks, 

Bill 
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