Choose circular or linear logging on Multiplatforms

In IBM MQ, we can choose circular or linear logging. The following information gives you an overview of both types.

Advantages of circular logging

The main advantages of circular logging are that circular logging is:

• Easier to administer.

  Once you have configured circular logging correctly for the workload, no further administration is needed. Whereas, for linear logging, media images need to be recorded and log extents that are not required any more need to be archived or deleted.

• Better performing

  Circular logging performs better than linear logging, because circular logging is able to reuse log extents that have already been formatted. Whereas linear logging has to allocate new log extents and format them.

See Manage logs for further information.

Advantages of linear logging

The principal advantage of linear logging is that linear logging provides protection against more failures.

Neither circular nor linear logging protect against a corrupted or deleted log, or messages or queues that have been deleted by applications or the administrator.

Linear logging (but not circular) enables damaged objects to be recovered. So, linear logging provides protection against queue files being corrupted or deleted, as these damaged queues can be recovered from a linear log.

Both circular and linear protect against power loss and communications failure as described in Recovering from power loss or communication failures.

Other considerations

Whether you choose linear or circular depends on how much redundancy you require.

There is a cost to choosing more redundancy, that is linear logging, caused by the performance cost and the administration cost.

See Types of logging for more information.

Parent topic: Plan your storage and performance requirements on Multiplatforms