>
>
>At Cisco, we had syslog messages coming in from tens of thousands of
>machines that generated millions of syslog entries a day. The
>messages were dumped into text files and once a minute the data was
>loaded and stored in the database. Why a database? *shrug* The only
>useful thing that we did was run Perl regexps stored in the DB over
>the data and send out custom alerts. I suppose the baby puke colors
>for the web interface were aesthetically pleasing to some, but I never
>saw the attaction.
>
Yeah.... but the question is - why could you not run those same regexps
on a text file :-)
>
>You can design to use or not use any one particular data storage
>format. What's nice about using a DB for this kind of stuff, however,
>is it's easily searchable via SQL, which, can be quite valuable.
>
Searchable for what? A regexp? I'll bet you my lunch, a simple grep on a
text file will be quicker :-)
And you don't need to vacuum it, and/or concern yourslef with writing
triggers ...
Dima