TABLE OF CONTENTS Log files records of events that have occurred in a system often contain information deemed crucial to a business. However, most times log files can be so large that it becomes almost impossible to extract useful data or find meaningful patterns in the amount of information that they provide. The Log Parser tool allows users to treat log files and other information as SQL tables, the rows of which can be queried, processed, and formatted in different ways. The power of the SQL language, together with the variety of data that can be processed by Log Parser, make it possible to extract specific information, calculate statistics, and generate reports from large amounts of data.
The Log Parser tool was born around 2000 as a utility to test the logging mechanisms of Microsoft s Internet Information Services (IIS). The first inception of the tool allowed users to retrieve and display all the fields from a single log file in any of the three text-logging formats supported by IIS.
As tests became more complicated, the need arose for more specialized tasks, including the possibility to filter log entries matching specific criteria and to sort the resulting entries according to values of specific fields. To provide a succinct and well-established way to specify these operations from a command-line shell, the tool underwent its first major makeover and began to support a very limited dialect of the SQL language. Log Parser 1.0 was born, and its use began spreading among internal...
