I'm not sure why you think there is a lot of overhead associated with triggers, they are very fast in my experience, but as David suggested, you can journal the files you want to track, then analyze the journal receivers.
To turn on Journaling you need to perform three steps:
- Create a receiver using
CRTJRNRCV
- Create a journal for the receiver using
CRTJRN
- Start journaling on the files using
STRJRNPF. You will need to keep *BEFORE and *AFTER images to detect a change on update, but you can omit *OPNCLS records to save some space.
Once you do this, you can also use commitment control to manage transactions! But, you will now have to manage those receivers as they use a lot of space. You can do that by using MNGRCV(*SYSTEM) on the CRTJRN command. I suspect that you will want to prevent the system from deleting the old receivers automatically as that could cause you to miss some changes when the system changes receivers. But that means you will have to delete old receivers on your own when you are done with them. I suggest waiting a day or two to delete old receivers. That can be an overnight process.
To read the journal receiver, you will need to use RTVJRNE (Retreive Journal Entries) which lets you retrieve journal entries into variables, or DSPJRN (Display Journal) which lets you return journal entries to the display, a printer file, or an *OUTFILE. The *OUTFILE can then be read using ODBC, or SQL or however you want to process it. You can filter the journal entries that you want to receive by file, and by type.
