RE: Journaling not practical?!?!

One of my clients ran a purge about 4 months ago and incorrectly deleted
about 70 million out of 100 million records in about 5 files.  They should
have only deleted about 60 million.  

It was too difficult to directly tell from the journals which of the 10
million records should be restored.  Those files are locked 24x7 less about
4 days per year.  The restore of all 70 million was done via an RPG program
that read the journal receiver entries (from about 20 receivers of 2Gig
each).  The restore took about 12 hours and the developer whose purge
program had the bug was extremely happy that journals existed and that I
could restore without kicking everyone off for 12 hours.

I have only had one customer since 1993 that did not already use journaling
or start on my suggestion.  Every single customer that did have it used it
on multiple occasions to recover something for one reason or another.  

A huge side benefit of journaling is its use as a problem solving tool.  How
did this field in this record get like this?  Journaling answers that kind
of question.  I would guess that I have looked at 5,000 JRNPRT reports in
the last 15 years.  Every developer was required to run test scenarios using
the following process:

        STRTST
        Run the test scenario
        ENDTST

The ENDTST command printed all of the journal activity for that job since
the STRTST was executed.  A nicely formatted JRNPRT report identified the
before and after value of fields that changed or nonblank value of fields in
records that were added or deleted. These were reviewed to understand the
database updates in a job stream.  Many times it was obvious from looking at
the JRNPRT that a logic error existed in some program.

As someone previously mentioned, journals are no longer the resource hog
they were back in the S38 days and early days of the 400. 

The moral of the story is that journaling is not a problem, it is a
solution.  It is very unpractical to not use journaling to assist in today's
complex database world that most of us live in. 

Don Tully Sr
Tully Consulting LLC



-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rob@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 1:07 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Journaling not practical?!?!

Restore data on a timely basis.  Like the numbskull who forgot the WHERE 
clause on his sql statement and ended up erroneously mucking up a few 
thousand records in a file.  So instead of simply doing a RMVJRNCHG I had 
to restore from the previous nights backup and lose all of the other 
transactions.

Rob Berendt