James, the first question you need to ask yourself is, "How quickly do
I really need this access log data?" In other words, do you really
need to log the info into your RDBMS immeditely, or can you you write
it to a log file, and then parse it out later and load it into your
RDBMS in a batch process?
Stephen, I hadn't heard of any aD enhancements to the ns_log module.
Can you fill us in, please?
Back when we were discussing and implementing a user tracking feature
for a site I worked on at aD, the consensus was that logging to the
AOLserver acess log and then parsing the info out later is almost
always the way to go. (This should always give you better
scaleability than trying to stuff non-time-critical user tracking into
your RDBMS on the fly.) Vadim Nasardinov came up with a simple (if
non-intuitive) way to log arbitrary stuff like user_id to the
AOLserver access log, but that didn't require any changes to the stock
ns_log module that came with AOLserver 3.2+ad12.
There is no ACS data wharehouse package! There is Richard
Li's old pre-alpha
Clickstream
package (and his
Master's thesis),
but while that's definitely worth learning from, you probably wouldn't
want to run it as is.
