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Auditing record changes

We have uploaded batch jobs that run during the day to insert/delete/update records in a keyed file. We've tried to add triggers to this file so that we can keep an audit trail of the changes. The problem is that sometimes we have approximately one million records that get updated/added by this day job. When we added the triggers it took very long to complete.

Here are the two approaches we took for the trigger program.

1. We created a COBOL program that added a record in the audit file.

2. We then created a CL program that wrote the before and after images to a data queue. At the end of the day, we copied the data from the data queue to the audit file.

The second approach was much faster than the first, but still it's not that fast.

I was wondering if there is a better approach to take.


OS/400 journals are really the best performing option for auditing record changes. The only way to really speed up a trigger program is to write the images to a data queue, which you've already done. Journaling is done at a much lower level in the system, so it's going to perform better than trigger auditing.

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This was first published in July 2003

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