The power of column stores
using column stores instead of row based stores can reduce access logs from 10 GB to 130 MB of disk space reading compressed log files is 4 times faster than reading uncompressed files from hard disk column stores can speed up analytical queries by a factor of 18-58 Normally, log files from a web server are stored in a single file. For archiving, log files get compressed with gzip. A typical line in a log file represents one request and looks like this: 173.15.3.XXX - - [30/May/2012:00:37:35 +0200] "GET /cms/ext/files/Sgs01Thumbs/sgs_pmwiki2.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 14241 "http://www.simple-groupware.de/cms/ManualPrint" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0" Compression speeds up reading the log file: $start = microtime(true); $fp = gzopen("httpd.log.gz", "r"); while (!gzeof($fp)) gzread($fp, 8192); gzclose($fp); echo (microtime(true)-$start)."s\n"; // 26s $start = microtime(true); $fp = fopen(...