Revised Server Log XML Format (PDF Tutorial)
In the last post, I discussed what I'm calling WSML (Web Server Markup Language), which is in XML format. The WSML format is used for temporary XML files that transfer web server log data from the Extended Log Format into a PHP application (which I have yet to write or post to my PHP blog on).
The current WSML format is in efficient. As I mentioned in the previous XML Tips post, a WSML file representing the same information as the source web server access log takes up almost twice as much file space. There are data redundancies we could eliminate. In database lingo, we need to "normalize" the WSML-formatted log data. Note that because the WSML format is used for temporary files, normalizing the XML document structure may not be of any benefit. However, I'll do so anyway, as the techniques in this post can be used to normalize any XML file that carries consistent/ predictable redundancies. The general principle is to "collapse" the XML document-tree nodes to accumulate common child nodes under a particular category. This will become clear with an example. The remainder of this post is in a PDF file [38 Kb]. This is an experiment to see whether a combination of Blog posts and PDF tutorials is an efficient way of discussing technical concepts. If you have any comments about this method, please drop me a line at rdash001-at-yahoo-dot-ca (email mangled to fool spambots).
(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://xml-tips.blogspot.com
The current WSML format is in efficient. As I mentioned in the previous XML Tips post, a WSML file representing the same information as the source web server access log takes up almost twice as much file space. There are data redundancies we could eliminate. In database lingo, we need to "normalize" the WSML-formatted log data. Note that because the WSML format is used for temporary files, normalizing the XML document structure may not be of any benefit. However, I'll do so anyway, as the techniques in this post can be used to normalize any XML file that carries consistent/ predictable redundancies. The general principle is to "collapse" the XML document-tree nodes to accumulate common child nodes under a particular category. This will become clear with an example. The remainder of this post is in a PDF file [38 Kb]. This is an experiment to see whether a combination of Blog posts and PDF tutorials is an efficient way of discussing technical concepts. If you have any comments about this method, please drop me a line at rdash001-at-yahoo-dot-ca (email mangled to fool spambots).
(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://xml-tips.blogspot.com
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