Electronic Journal

An Electronic Journal enables a financial institution to store and retrieve data from a set of tables, such as flat indexed files or DB2® tables, where each table represents a log of the operations performed during a certain period (usually one day). The institution defines the number of required tables. Normally, an institution keeps a different table for each day of the week, so that all the days are simultaneously accessible. It also defines a backup policy so that each day's data can safely overwrite the data from the same day of the previous week. The institution also defines different tables for different entities, such as the branch, the terminals, and the users, so that information about an operation related to a specific entity can be easily retrieved.

It must be possible to store, retrieve, and update data in the journal. For example, an implementation may specify that a record is written when an operation starts, and then either another record is written when the operation finishes or the existing record is updated with the operation result. Due to the logging nature of the journal system, deletion is not supported.

A journal system implementation must also provide data integrity, allowing commit and rollback operations to be performed automatically by the system or by an application demand.

The IBM® Bank Transformation Toolkit for WebSphere® Studio provides the following: