Re: Proposal: Adding json logging

> On Apr 15, 2018, at 10:07, Christophe Pettus <xof(at)thebuild(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
>> On Apr 15, 2018, at 09:51, David Arnold <dar(at)xoe(dot)solutions> wrote:
>>
>> 1. Throughout this vivid discussion a good portion of support has already been manifested for the need of a more structured (machine readable) logging format. There has been no substantial objection to this need.
>
> I'm afraid I don't see that. While it's true that as a standard, CSV is relatively ill-defined, as a practical matter in PostgreSQL it is very easy to write code that parses .csv format.

More specifically, JSON logging does seem to be a solution in search of a problem. PostgreSQL's CSV logs are very easy to machine-parse, and if there are corrupt lines being emitted there, the first step should be to fix those, rather than introduce a new "this time, for sure" logging method.

It's a matter of a few lines of code to convert CSV logs to a JSON format, if you need JSON format for something else.

Remember, also, that every new logging format introduces a burden on downstream tools to support it. This is (still) an issue with JSON format plans, which had a much more compelling advantage over standard-format plans than JSON logs do over CSV.

--
-- Christophe Pettus
xof(at)thebuild(dot)com