RE: View row data in QSYS2.DISPLAY_JOURNAL

Exactly, hard evidence wins every time.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Jones [mailto:mike.jones.sysdev@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2017 1:32 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: View row data in QSYS2.DISPLAY_JOURNAL

Many years ago, I wrote a tool to extract journal receiver data and dump it into a copy of the table that contains the column / record layout, with journal receiver columns tacked onto the right portion of the row, so the data and journal column results are directly query-able. Works great except it doesn't handle some of the more recent, exotic column types, BLOBs being one of them. Adding support for exotic data types hasn't come close to the top of my priority stack for my current role in recent years.

One difficult to handle scenario is when a table's column layout changes, that can lead to data shifting in the BLOB journal entries (i.e. journal entries with different column buffer positions inside the same journal receiver). Aside from dealing with that scenario, providing a tool to do this shouldn't be too hard, but like I said I never implemented data types like BLOB, CLOB, datalink, XML, and a few others IIRC, that might turn into a PITA.

I received a lot of benefit from using said tool many years ago in roles with more production support duties. There's no substitute for knowing "what actually occurred" (from the journal data) versus "what should have happened" (from the opinions of people involved).

Mike