In the second part of this now two-part series on "what did Greg write for Redmond this month", I wanted to focus you on an interesting (and quite old) tool for parsing log and text files called Log Parser.

I found this tool while searching around for a way to convert text files into manageable strings without having to use VBScript text manipulation. Though much of the tool will soon be deprecated as people move to PowerShell, there are still some pretty interesting text file manipulation capabilities you can get out of the tool. The examples given in the piece are: Pulling and sorting Event Log entries, enumerating disk space usage, and nicely formatting and sorting CSV/TSV files. All this with an easy to use T-SQL search syntax.

If you've used Log Parser successfully, I'd be curious to know. There's a small community of log parsers and their "check me out" syntax strings at www.logparser.com. If you haven't, the article can be found on the Redmond Magazine website at: http://redmondmag.com/columns/article.asp?editorialsid=1691