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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Ok debug logging into a table is probably one of the best improvements to logging I've seen in a long time. I kinda want this in every programming language. There are so many useful things about it, especially the ability to then randomly sort it at will!

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It's been available in Chrome for a year and a half.. https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AddyOsmani/posts/PmTC5wwJVEc ..this is actually one of the things that's most annoying about web dev - each browser has some really cool stuff for debugging, but none of them has everything. The Firefox team are addressing that though - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/09/firefox-tools-adapter/ - Firefox nightly can connect to Chrome's debugging interface so you can use Firefox's toolset to debug a page in Chrome. Which is insanely cool.

I was under the impression that it only connects to the debugging interface on chrome for android. Has this changed?

? console.table (and fancy console.log html stuff) has been in Chrome and WebKit since 2012.

Yes, that's correct: The "Firefox Tools Adapter" targets Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Firefox_Tools...

You can also debug desktop Chrome with the devtools adapter. Its shown in the video on this page: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/09/firefox-tools-adapter

I think even IE11 supports it.

You might enjoy http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf . They put everything into tables (debug logs, profiling info, server state, monitoring statistics, messages sent/received etc) and then debug the system by writing queries on the tables.

    cat /var/log/syslog | grep -i 'problem'

is also a query on the `/var/log/syslog` "database".

What would be really cool is a RDBMS where the single pieces of data in the cells are related to each other. For example the user IDs in the authentication log could be matched with the IDs present in the request log.

Why add the extra cat command?

grep -i 'problem' /var/log/syslog

He's after this weeks "Useless use of cat" award: http://www.smallo.ruhr.de/award.html#cat

Good to see there's still some competitors out there.

What a silly thing to complain about.

It was light hearted, comes with a smiley now :)

pipelines read better left to right

    </var/log/syslog grep -i 'problem'

because invariably you're going to want to recall this command from history and insert "grep -v HostnameIDontCareAbout" between the cat and the grep. or you're going to want to replace "grep -i 'problem'" with "awk '/problem/ { print $3 }". or you're going to want to do both.

people whine about 'useless use of cat' like it's still 1982, but the fact is that it's convenient for iterative development of a pipeline in situ and it costs nothing.

Apache Drill lets you search logs using column base requirements.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/DRILL/Querying+a...

It doesn't work on files with no extension yet or at least there's a bug report on it:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DRILL-1320?filter=-3

Have a look at lnav: http://tstack.github.io/lnav/

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