The problem which the higher ups generally need solved is, "How many people are/were on at <time>?" where <time> may be "now", "5:04:02 yesterday", or "between 2:00 and 10:00 two thursdays ago".

On trick for approaching this problem is to consider who is asking the question, and how much accuracy they really need. (They might say they want to be able to ask for the number of sessions at an arbitrary time, but will the go away happy if you give them a session count to the nearest five-minute interval?)

And if your "higher ups" are anything like what mine have been, they communicate using PowerPoint. Consider answering their questions in a similar way -- with a one page graphic.

Instead of building a fancy query facility, scan the logs once, and emit enough data to feed into your favorite graphing tool (I've used Excel) to produce a graph they can look at. Dropping out a datapoint every 5 minutes gives you more than enough data to build a nice line chart. You can even automate the process via Win32::OLE.

My bosses have appreciated it when I've given them stuff they can copy/paste into a PowerPoint slide.

In reply to Re: How to do session times The Right Way by dws
in thread How to do session times The Right Way by strider corinth

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