Welcome to Nerdville

Thanks to Aaron Johnson’s pretty swell article about the Microsoft Log Parser (included in the IIS admin. toolkit and also available for separate download), I am now well on my way to Microsoft log-parsing heaven. If such a place exists.

Here at work we are faced with a similar problem to Aaron’s (no, the other one) where we are required to generate server log-based statistics that aren’t covered by standard web stats packages like AWStats et al. We have to count occurrences of specific URL variables within the requests and things of that nature. Hopefully Log Parser 2.2 with its completely awesome SQL interpreter will be able to give us the data we need in a format we can use.

Yes, we use ColdFusion here (for the time being), and yes, it does suck. A lot. Its largest points of failure are interoperability and extensibility (mostly due to a widespread apathy in the programming community; it supports extension through Java classes/beans/whatever, but not many people spend the time to build the kinds of things PHP has available), and also huge, gaping language deficiencies. But more about that later.