"Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
> > From my perspective, we could really use a "delimiter" between the
> > "fields" of log output which is unlikely to appear within those fields
> > instead of parsing by character count, rather than making dbname a
> > special case.
>
> Well, Andrew was arguing that space is a likely character in dbnames,
> but then again it's possible to put "]" into dbnames. I think the only
> way to make this completely unambiguous would be to introduce a quoting
> convention for dbnames (and usernames when those get added). But if
> the goal is to allow simple parsing of log entries, that won't improve
> matters at all.
>
> My feeling about it is that DBAs who want to automatically parse log
> entries can just forbid spaces in the dbnames and usernames they allow.
> The KISS principle applies here.
>
> A variant (which'd be okay with me) is to separate these fields with
> tabs instead of spaces; then the rule for DBAs would be "don't allow
> tabs in db/user names".
The tabs are not properly treated by syslogd, look this piece of log:
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157296] LOG: connection received:
host=[local]
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157297] LOG: connection
authorized: user=kalman database=kalman
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157298] DEBUG:
/usr/bin/postmaster child[19490]: starting with (
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157299] DEBUG: ^Ipostgres
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157300] DEBUG: ^I-v131072
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157301] DEBUG: ^I-p
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157302] DEBUG: ^Ikalman
Aug 6 01:02:16 dell-01 postgres[19490]: [157303] DEBUG: )
do you see: ^I that are "chars" that syslogd hate.
Regards
Gaeatano Mendola