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#Journaling

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Global journaling records all global update operations performed on a database, and used in conjunction with backup makes it possible to restore a database to its state immediately before a failure or crash.

While backup is the cornerstone of physical recovery, it is not the complete answer. Restoring a database from backup does not recover global updates made since that backup, which may have been created a number of hours before the point at which physical integrity was lost. These post-backup updates can be restored to the database from journal files after the database is restored from backup, bringing the database up to date. Any transactions open at the time of the failure are rolled back to ensure transaction integrity.

Documentation.

Article
· Nov 24 4m read
Journal File Indexer

Hi community!

In this article, I'm excited to introduce my latest application, Journal File Indexer. The development of this application is rooted in the portal idea DPI-I-270.

In short, this application lets you load and index a log file in a database.

Why?

If you've ever used the log file search function in the management portal, you may have encountered a timeout error or even a blank page. This problem usually occurs when searching a large journal file. Journal File Indexer solves this problem by considerably increasing the speed of searches once the file has been loaded into the database.

Another problem arises during the restoration process. When searching for global entries in a log file to restore old or new values, the management portal doesn't have this specific functionality. A routine must therefore be coded to achieve this. Journal File Indexer comes to the rescue, incorporating a restore function!

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I'm working for an organisation that is running a very old version of InterSystems Cache (5.016) which runs on AIX . The last two times we have re-booted Cache, we have encountered rollbacks. I've been asked two questions. During the rollback it was "How long is it going to take?" and after the system returned, it was "So what caused it?". My answer to both was "I don't know".

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Hi!

Currently, I'm working on a script using %SYS.Journal API.

My journal files are compressed, following the documentation the compression is zstd.

I tried to unzip a file with zstd tool, ex: 

apt-get update
apt-get install zstd

zstd -d 20230806.001z -o 20230806.001

20230806.001z        : 92.03%   (909312 => 836859 bytes, 20230806.001)

Unfortunately, the unzipped file is invalid:

Write ##class(%SYS.Journal.File).IsValidJournal("/usr/irissys/mgr/journal/20230806.001")

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I have several 1GB journals from a LIVE server that I would like to inspect (eg: check which globals have been updated over the time).

Is there a simple way to view those journals using another IRIS instance ? (eg: local installation).

I have been tempted to put those files directly into the journal folder of my local installation and restart the system, however I am concerned that the transactions they contains will be restored and will corrupt the local database.

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Recently I needed to restore a version of a production class, which was overwritten by compilation and running UpdateProduction. As the correct version was unavailable in the source control, I used journals to restore the data. Journals store a plethora of information about what's happening in the system and are quite a powerful tool. This article explains how to work with journals to extract the data you require.

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Question
· Oct 7, 2022
Mirror Failover Settings

Hi All,

Our mirrored HealthShare environment has failed over a few times recently due to underlying infrastructure issues (that are being worked on and resolved).

In the HealthShare logs we are seeing:

10/06/22-00:54:35:925 (4736) 1 Journal Daemon has been inactive with I/O pending for 10 seconds:
gjrnoff=524741316,iocomplete=523852600,filecnt=1011,fail=0
10/06/22-00:54:55:086 (4736) 3 CP: Pausing users because Journal Daemon has not shown
signs of activity for 30 seconds. Users will resume if Journal Daemon is active again

My question is:

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Working in support, I usually get asked how many days I should keep journals. Should it be two days or after two backups? More? Less? Why two?

The correct answer (for most of the environments) is that you should keep the journals since the last validated Backup. I.e., until you don't check if a Backup is valid (restoring the file and checking with the Integrity utility), you can't be sure there is a good copy of your data and can't purge the journals safely.

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Hello community!

I'm facing a base growth issue, which is being generated by a process and an Ensemble feature.

When executing the process of cleaning up the message queues, the Ensemble “preserves” the Streams that were part of these messages, deleting only the Header and Body. In this way the database (of one of the namespaces) has grown around 60GB per day, which has been maxing out the disk capacity.

InterSystems informed that this is a characteristic and that it is explained in the documents mentioned below.

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Question
· Apr 23, 2021
Log (Journal) shipping

I am new to Cache, we are trying to move a 4 TB database over the internet, but this will be take too long to copy the single backup file. In Oracle and MS-SQL Server there is an option of doing log shipping. Is there such an option in Cache?

I want to copy the initial backup file one weekend, then keep sending the Journals (logs) the new location.

Thank you,

Eudoro

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Hi,

We are using CACHE 2017.2.1, I would like to retrieve data from Journal for killed global. Let say we have global name ^ EMP(123) with data and also have some child nodes and it has been killed by using cache kill command for some reason and we don't know who has executed this and when. My questions are below.

1) Can we get back the data of killed global from journal files,Is it possible or not ?

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In this article I'd like to share with you a phenomena that is best you avoid - something you should be aware of when designing your data model (or building your Business Processes) in Caché or in Ensemble (or older HealthShare Health Connect Ensemble-based versions).

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Question
· Mar 30, 2020
Error Switching Journal

Hi,

I'm having a problem when I'm attempting to freeze the instance.

I have a pre-script and post-script to freeze and unfreeze the instance, but when the script execute: 

 csession INSTANCE_NAME -U '%SYS' "##Class(Backup.General).ExternalFreeze(\"$SNAPLOG\",,,,,,1800)"

It's give me this error and fails the freeze: 

Backup.General.ExternalFreeze: Failed, Unable to switch local journal file, Error: -99,ERROR #1142: Error switching journal file: 0
vi

At cconsole.log file show this:

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Currently we are using Health Share 2015.2.2, and looking to upgrade to the latest version in the next month.

From what I understand we have to upgrade to 2017 or 2018 prior to going to 2019.1 since 2019.1 is on the IRIS platform.

In trying to outline my steps in the upgrade process I came up with a question.

  • Can a Full System Backup from 2015.2.2 be restored into 2019.1?
  • Do I have to restore the 2015.2.2 back up into 2017 or 2018, then do the 2019.1 conversion?

Has anyone had experience with this? or should I open a ticket with WRC?

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I'm a DBA and support Caché databases on AIX. I coded shell scripts for monitoring journaling status, databases size, license end date.

We recently got a new instance of Caché on Windows. I'm just curious to know whether anyone coded database monitoring scripts on Windows using PowerShell or any other scripting language.

If yes, please share the details.

Thanks & Regards,

Bharath Nunepalli.

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Just wondering if anyone knows if there is a way to get daily emails or alerts about changes to a cache database. I know that all of that information is contained within the journal files, just wondering if there is a way to bundle it up each day and send it off for auditing, etc.

Any solution where a plain-text/readable format of changes to the cache database could be sent or stored for review would solve the issue.

Thanks!

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Hello, community!

I've stumbled on some unexpected behavior, and decided to check with you if this is normal. Basically, I'm rebuilding indices and the result is not journaling (which leads to missing indices at shadow server).

The $ZV is "Cache for UNIX (Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86-64) 2015.2.1 (Build 705U) Mon Aug 31 2015 16:53:38 EDT"

I have an example class 

Class tmp.A As %Persistent;

Index IP1 On P1;

Property P1 As %String;

for example there is one object which have P1 = 1, so

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In System Administration | Configuration | System Configuration | Journal Settings there is a check box for Freeze on error.

From reading the documentation, it sounds like the choice to freeze on error is one of system availability vs system integrity.

Curious to know whether Ensemble users choose to freeze on error or not.

If you have a best practice recommendation based upon your experience or knowledge, that would be helpful information too.

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Currently, we are running 2014.1 on two different servers (OpenVMS, RHEL). The plan is to transition from OpenVMS to RHEL, but our Write Daemon is in a Troubled state on both servers.

On the OpenVMS server, we have a WIJ file that's 26G and can grow to 40G (size of database cache). Since it hasn't grown to 40G, we don't believe the size of the WIJ file to be the issue.

What else should we be looking at regarding the performance of the Write Daemon?

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Question
· Mar 21, 2017
Journal file I/O error

One of my journal spaces has status "IOER" in MSM MUMPS.

I think this is happend during system freeze.

I never seeing a journal file status like that. I did not find anything about it in the intersystems documentation.

I can simply delete the damaged file, but I'd like to know how to prevent this from happening.

Anyone have some idea about it?

My MSM-UNIX Version is 4.4.0.

Thanks

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