It is easy to jump to the conclusion that whatever i5/OS™ provides by default must be the best choice for your shop, but that is not always the case. This is particularly true when it comes to thinking about the kinds of extra metadata i5/OS appends to each journal entry (metadata that takes up space!).

You can think of a journal entry like a candy bar. It has a sweet spot inside (your database row image) and it also has a surrounding wrapper. Just like real candy bars, sometimes the wrapper provides essential information you cannot do without (for example, does the candy bar include any ingredients to which my child has an allergy?), and sometimes it provides more information than you really need. Also, much like real candy bars, you can request more elaborate/colorful wrappers or you can settle for a plainer wrapper. The standard wrapper provided by default for journal entries is a middle ground, neither too fancy nor too plain, but that does not mean the information it houses is truly needed by your shop.

Got a million journal entries? If so, you have a million wrappers as well. The question is, “How fancy do your wrappers need to be and are you really using the optional information housed within the standard wrappers or are they more fancy (and costly) that you really need?”

This Technote lays out two ways in which you can elect to dispense with the more elaborate wrappers and settle instead for a simpler, smaller, more efficient, and perhaps more practical approach.

Written by Larry Youngren, Software Engineer IBM Systems &Technology Group, Development iSeries Journaling