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> using logs that can be JOINed to actual data tables as necessary is pretty easy Can you give me a concrete example of how you would use this?

by geon 13y ago

VLM 13y ago
If by concrete you mean business case example, it comes up a lot in "the last three people to modify this record were..." Security audit trail type stuff "Why is this salesguy apparently manually by hand downloading the entire master customer list alphabetically?". This isn't all doom and gloom stuff either... "You're spending three weeks collecting the city/state of every customer so a marketing intern can plot an artsy graph by hand of 10000 customers using photoshop? OMG no, watch what I can do with google maps/earth and about 10 lines of perl in about 15 minutes" Or at least I can run a sql select that saves them about 50000 mouse clicks in about 2 minutes of work. Most "suit" types don't get the concept of a database and see it as a big expensive Excel where any query more complicated than select * is best done by a peon by hand. I've caught people manually alphabetizing database data in Word for example. Another thing that comes up a lot in automation is treating a device differently WRT monitoring and alerting tools if a change was logged within the last 3 days. So your email alert for a monitored device reads contains a line something like "the last config change made was X hours ago by ...". Most of the time when X=0 or X=1 the alert is because ... screwed up, and when it isn't a short phone call to ... is problem isolation step #1. This was all normal daily operations business use cases, aside from the usual theoretical data mining type stuff, like a user in A/B marketing test area "B" tends to update data table Q ten times more often than marketing test area "A" or whatever correlation seems reasonable (or not).
- geon 13y ago
  That sounds reasonable. I've been thinking about doing logging as a text blob on the affected object, but it haven't seemed useful enough. Using your approach, I guess it would be a table like create table logs ( tableName varchar, oldValue text, newValue text, userID int, when datetime ); Or did I miss something?

> using logs that can be JOINed to actual data tables as necessary is pretty easy Can you give me a concrete example of how you would use this?

by geon 13y ago

> using logs that can be JOINed to actual data tables as necessary is pretty easy Can you give me a concrete example of how you would use this?

VLM 13y ago

If by concrete you mean business case example, it comes up a lot in "the last three people to modify this record were..." Security audit trail type stuff "Why is this salesguy apparently manually by hand downloading the entire master customer list alphabetically?". This isn't all doom and gloom stuff either... "You're spending three weeks collecting the city/state of every customer so a marketing intern can plot an artsy graph by hand of 10000 customers using photoshop? OMG no, watch what I can do with google maps/earth and about 10 lines of perl in about 15 minutes" Or at least I can run a sql select that saves them about 50000 mouse clicks in about 2 minutes of work. Most "suit" types don't get the concept of a database and see it as a big expensive Excel where any query more complicated than select * is best done by a peon by hand. I've caught people manually alphabetizing database data in Word for example. Another thing that comes up a lot in automation is treating a device differently WRT monitoring and alerting tools if a change was logged within the last 3 days. So your email alert for a monitored device reads contains a line something like "the last config change made was X hours ago by ...". Most of the time when X=0 or X=1 the alert is because ... screwed up, and when it isn't a short phone call to ... is problem isolation step #1. This was all normal daily operations business use cases, aside from the usual theoretical data mining type stuff, like a user in A/B marketing test area "B" tends to update data table Q ten times more often than marketing test area "A" or whatever correlation seems reasonable (or not).

geon 13y ago
That sounds reasonable. I've been thinking about doing logging as a text blob on the affected object, but it haven't seemed useful enough. Using your approach, I guess it would be a table like create table logs ( tableName varchar, oldValue text, newValue text, userID int, when datetime ); Or did I miss something?