Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pielud 4917 days ago
> RDBMS exist because people use to query those systems directly , does your users log into your database directly ?

No, but I do. What if I want to analyze my data in some way I hadn't expected? SQL lets me do that with a single query.

1 comments

do you really need schema for this?

look at web server logs, they have no schema, each line is not related with others, yet we are able to analyze logs

How do I combine data from multiple log files? How do I tweak my "queries" without scanning all of the data again? You get this kinds of things (joins, indexes, etc) for free from RDBMS. If I'm analyzing log files I have to write my own code to do it.

I'm not saying RDBMS is the best solution for everything and neither is OP. But it's appropriate when you don't necessarily know every way you want to access your data up front.

Many of the more advanced log analysis tools actually parse the logs and put them in a SQL database.