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The New Logging

Summary

Introduce a new configuration to make the databend's logging more user-friendly, and create more space for further improvement.

Motivation

Databend's logging is verbose.

Every log will be written to both files and the console. Users can't control the logging behavior.

For examples:

  • Users can't specify the JSON / TEXT format for stderr or files.
  • Users can't disable the file's logging

Even worse, we can't leave meaningful messages to users. Our users will be overwhelmed by a large number of logs. We should use stdout to communicate with the user.

Guide-level explanation

With this RFC, users will have new config options:

[log.file]
on = true
level = "debug"
dir = "./databend/logs"
format = "json"

[log.stderr]
on = true
level = "debug"
format = "text"
  • Users can disable any of the output
  • Users can control the log level and formats

By default, we will enable the file log only. And start databend-query will not print records to stderr anymore. We will print the following messages to stdout instead:

Databend Server starting at xxxxxxx (took x.xs)

Information

version: v0.7.128-xxxxx
logs:    
  file:   enabled dir=./databend/logs level=DEBUG
  stderr: disabled (set LOG_STDERR_ON=true to enable)
storage: s3://endpoint=127.0.0.1:1090,bucket=test,root=/path/to/data
metasrv: embed

Connection

MySQL:             mysql://root@localhost:3307/xxxx
clickhouse:        clickhouse://root@locahost:9000/xxxx
clickhouse (HTTP): http://root:@locahost:9001

Useful Links

Documentation:    https://databend.rs
Looking for help: https://github.com/datafuselabs/databend/discussions

To enable stderr logs, we can set LOG_STDERR_ON=true or RUST_LOG=info.

Reference-level explanation

Internally, we will add new config structs in Config. The old config will be compatible.

Drawbacks

None

Rationale and alternatives

Minio​

Minio doesn't print logs to stdout nor stderr. Instead, they only print welcome messages:

:) minio server . --address ":9900"
MinIO Object Storage Server
Copyright: 2015-0000 MinIO, Inc.
License: GNU AGPLv3 <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html>
Version: RELEASE.2022-06-30T20-58-09Z (go1.18.3 Linux/amd64)

API: http://192.168.1.104:9900  http://172.16.195.1:9900  http://192.168.97.1:9900  http://127.0.0.1:9900
root user: minioadmin
RootPass: minioadmin

WARNING: Console endpoint is listening on a dynamic port (34219), please use --console-address ":PORT" to choose a static port.
Console: http://192.168.1.104:34219 http://172.16.195.1:34219 http://192.168.97.1:34219 http://127.0.0.1:34219
root user: minioadmin
RootPass: minioadmin

Command-line: https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-client-quickstart-guide
   $ mc alias set myminio http://192.168.1.104:9900 minioadmin minioadmin

Documentation: https://docs.min.io

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ You are running an older version of MinIO released 2 weeks ago ┃
┃ Update: Run `mc admin update`                                  ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

CockroachDB​

CockroachDB doesn't print logs to stderr by default:

They allow users to use --log=<yaml-config> to specify the logging behavior.

:) ./cockroach start-single-node
CockroachDB node starting at 2022-07-21 06:56:04.36859988 +0000 UTC (took 0.7s)
build:               CCL v22.1.4 @ 2022/07/19 17:09:48 (go1.17.11)
WebUI:               http://xuanwo-work:8080
sql:                 postgresql://root@xuanwo-work:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=disable
sql (JDBC):          JDBC:postgresql://xuanwo-work:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=disable&user=root
RPC client flags:    ./cockroach <client cmd> --host=xuanwo-work:26257 --insecure
logs:                /tmp/cockroach-v22.1.4.linux-amd64/cockroach-data/logs
temp dir:            /tmp/cockroach-v22.1.4.linux-amd64/cockroach-data/cockroach-temp3237741659
external I/O path:   /tmp/cockroach-v22.1.4.linux-amd64/cockroach-data/extern
store[0]:            path=/tmp/cockroach-v22.1.4.linux-amd64/cockroach-data
storage engine:      pebble
clusterID:           e1ab003d-7eba-48cd-b635-7a51f40269c2
status:              restarted pre-existing node
nodeID:              1

Prior art

None

Unresolved questions

None

Future possibilities

Add HTTP log support​

Allow sending logs to the HTTP endpoint

Support read SQL from stdin​

Based on this RFC, we can implement reading SQL from stdin.