Looking at the Transaction Logs
Category Administration
The Domino transaction log is such a gift, that I can't understand why anyone would not use it. Actually, there is one reason not to use a transaction log, that I consider justifiable. With all the security features available on Domino/Notes, guess what? You can't encrypt transaction logs !
You can encrypt the network connection, the database can be encrypted--but transaction logs write out in clear-text. If you think about it, the purpose for a transaction log is to buffer the dirty cache, so that database write-commits can be performed at a more leisurely pace with no risk to data loss. Encrypting the transaction log would slow it down, and it's designed to write-to-disk as fast as it can. Of course, if you need complete security then it's always possible to electronically sign and encrypt each document. Another option is to use a hardware storage encryption device, which is how some sites handle their transaction logs.
One other neat feature of transaction logs is the ability to back up just the daily transactions, so that the incremental backups are truly incremental. At my site, the storage wasn't gauged correctly for the transaction logs, and before we can do transaction log enabled backups, we'll need to expand the capacity of the transaction volume because they don't hold 24 hours worth of data.
Which begs the question, how big should a transaction log be? In the last conversation I had with an IBM engineer, I was told that if there wasn't a need for transaction based backups, then two to three hours would be enough. Periodically, I double check to make sure that the timestamps on the *.txn records created by transaction logging, are in the ballpark.
The Domino transaction log is such a gift, that I can't understand why anyone would not use it. Actually, there is one reason not to use a transaction log, that I consider justifiable. With all the security features available on Domino/Notes, guess what? You can't encrypt transaction logs !
You can encrypt the network connection, the database can be encrypted--but transaction logs write out in clear-text. If you think about it, the purpose for a transaction log is to buffer the dirty cache, so that database write-commits can be performed at a more leisurely pace with no risk to data loss. Encrypting the transaction log would slow it down, and it's designed to write-to-disk as fast as it can. Of course, if you need complete security then it's always possible to electronically sign and encrypt each document. Another option is to use a hardware storage encryption device, which is how some sites handle their transaction logs.
One other neat feature of transaction logs is the ability to back up just the daily transactions, so that the incremental backups are truly incremental. At my site, the storage wasn't gauged correctly for the transaction logs, and before we can do transaction log enabled backups, we'll need to expand the capacity of the transaction volume because they don't hold 24 hours worth of data.
Which begs the question, how big should a transaction log be? In the last conversation I had with an IBM engineer, I was told that if there wasn't a need for transaction based backups, then two to three hours would be enough. Periodically, I double check to make sure that the timestamps on the *.txn records created by transaction logging, are in the ballpark.
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