The transient journal is a system-maintained dictionary table that provides a way to protect transactions from system failures and from deadlock (see Deadlock for a description of deadlock). Each transaction processed by Vantage records a before change image of rows that are touched by the transaction. Then if a transaction fails, the before change image of any modified rows can be retrieved from the transient journal and written over the modifications, returning the row to the same state it was in before the transaction occurred. Vantage removes all before change images from the transient journal after a transaction commits.