On Fri, 12 May 2000, Chris Wagner wrote: >At 09:23 PM 5/11/00 +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: >>it's faster for some things, but i find it really clumsy and difficult >>to work with. postgres' psql is vastly superior to the mysql admin tool >>- and from what i hear, psql is supposed to be even better in the new >>version 7. > >I was only considering the application to web stats. For any kind of "real" >database work I'ld say use Postgres. For elementary or trivial purposes, >MySQL's speed makes it worth it. Especially for webstats. If you have even >a moderately busy site, the log files can get enormous. In a piping >situation, a slow database could even slow down the web server.
One thing that just occurred to me, this can solve the problem with reverse DNS lookups. We can have a table of reverse DNS data from the web clients with time-stamps (so it can be expired after a configured amount of time), then after a successful DNS lookup we can do a select of all entries matching that IP and put the DNS name in the table entry. My personal web server is lightly loaded (20MB transferred in a busy week). But it takes several hours to do all the DNS lookups. I once had a power failure during this time which caused my stats to be skipped with was a real PITA. Doing it through a database could solve this (amoung many other things). Then if the web page stats were all in a database there would be lots of cool options like "click on one of the top URLs of the week for a graph of how popular it was in all previous weeks". -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X
