Electronic Journal

A journal is a log of the services and processes used or performed by an entity such as branch, user, or terminal. The Electronic Journal service enables a financial institution to store this data in a set of database tables and then retrieve the data.

In the journal, each table represents a log of the services and processes that the entity requests during a certain period. The period is normally one day. The current journal is a unique file or table that logs the current day's activities. Other file or tables in the set maintain the activities for previous periods (typically a week if the current journal holds a single day's activities.) The Electronic Journal service does not care about the number of files or tables in the journal set. Normally an institution keeps a different file or table for each day of the week so that all the days are simultaneously accessible. The institution also usually defines a backup policy so that each day's data can safely overwrite the data from the same day of the previous week. In any case, the journal system implementation must provide data integrity, allowing the system to perform commits and rollbacks automatically or on demand by an application.