Hi George,
if your application wants data from one or a few tables only, it may be more efficient to use triggers rather than retrieving and evaluating journal entries. However, there are a few things to consider:
- Dependent on your definition, the trigger program will get executed for each row during an INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE operation. For mass operations, this may slow down performance.
- Your trigger program gets the information at exactly the moment when the change happens. If you want to evaluate all changes during a longer period of time, you need to store that information somewhere (e.g. in your own data library).
- If you add a trigger from outside the SAP application, the SAP dictionary does not know about it, and the trigger information will get lost during a database export/import. You can add the trigger manually after the import, but you must be aware of that.
An introduction to database triggers can be found at http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/dbp/rbaforzahftra.htm.
Kind regards,
Christian Bartels.