Re: On Logging

On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 05:54:49PM -0500, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:57:54AM -0700, Ron Mayer wrote:
> > David Fetter wrote:
> > >...log file formats in 8.0....
> > >
> > >* CSV
> > >* YAML
> > >* XML
> > >* Piped logs, as Apache can do
> > >* DB handle. I know this one will be controversial.
> > >[...]
> > >1. Am I the only one who would wants an option for
> > >machine-readable logs?
> >
> > I'd very much like a format that can be easily loaded into a
> > database (not necessarily the same one producing the logs :-) ) in
> > real time and/or be visible as a table through something like
> > dbi-link.
> >
> > I suppose any of the first three formats you suggest could work
> > with dbi-link; or another alternate format
> > * sql insert statements
> > would work if piped logs were supported by sending it to psql.
>
> Apache seems to have the best, most flexible logging of anything out
> there, and should probably be used as a model. It's pretty easy to
> have it actually log to a database.

Great :)

> Whatever method we decide on, I think it would be very useful if we
> supported multiple logging streams. I certainly wouldn't want to
> give up a human-readable log to get a CSV one.

Excellent idea.

> Is a logging mechanism the best way to do profiling? Seems like it
> might be better to have a more efficient, dedicated method.

I'm not totally confident in my ability to think up everything I'd
want to look at, every way I'd want to look at it in advance. I'm
pretty sure I can't come up with every way everyone could want to do
profiling, though.

> But I'm not against adding capabilities like per-backend logging,
> etc.

How would per-backend logging work?

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david(at)fetter(dot)org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100 mobile: +1 415 235 3778

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