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I keep hearing about how relational databases provide these benefits, and yet my experience is the opposite.

This, especially, made me laugh:

YOU don't need to worry about reliability, etc. Your RDBMS vendor has done that for you, and your DBA has been trained in how to do these things.

Maybe in some organizations there's a glut of experienced, helpful DBAs, but not here. We basically have this one guy. He's pretty good, but he's just one guy. Database backups and restores are known sources of operator error. I've never seen a relational database as reliable as a file system. On scalability, sure, I could believe that relational databases beat flat files there, but that's not a design consideration here (well, not yet). The concerns right now are reliability and the ability to "just work" without the operators needing to necessarily know how DI reads log messages.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a believer in relational databases in some contexts, but they're also fragile beasts requiring lots of baggage to support. (I already get those 3AM phone calls relating to business critical processes that failed, and have no desire to introduce anything so tempermental into the system)

Relational logging is nice when you need the aggregation power, or the ability to say "show me the log messages issued from time A to time B by any process on any system" - that is, to perform queries across multiple jobs' log messages, but that's not what we need at all.

@/=map{[/./g]}qw/.h_nJ Xapou cets krht ele_ r_ra/;
map{y/X_/\n /;print}map{pop@$_}@/for@/
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