Randal's method is better. There is less to management. I would change the date to a MySQL date field which will store information as YYYY-MM-DD.

    "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS visits
    (
       id int auto_increment not null,
       searchengine char(48) NOT NULL,
       useragent char(32) NOT NULL,
       ip char(32) NOT NULL,
       date date NOT NULL,
       primary key  (id)
    )");
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You may have to use some perl magic to format the date appropriately. Although this probably not the most efficient way to write this, it demonstrates my point :)

(undef, undef, undef, $Day, $Month, $Year, undef, undef, undef) = loca
+ltime(time);

$Month++;
$Year += 1900;

$MySQLDate = "${Year}-${Month}-${Day}";
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By including the searchengine field and a little extra work, you can also create some great reports such as:

- how many searchengine entries per day

select searchengine, date, count(*) from visits group by searchengine,
+ date order by date desc
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- how many searchengine entries for a specific day

select searchengine, date, count(*) from visits where date = '2004-01-
+31' group by searchengine, date order by date desc
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- total number of searchengine entries

select searchengine, count(*) from visits group by searchengine
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And other reports based on IP addresses, specific useragents, and so on... You could also pass that information to GD::Graph::Bar and create some nice looking bar graphs that management will like. Even get more crafty and email them routinely to people using MIME::Lite and a cron job. These search engine can be found CPAN.

Marc Bilodeau
www.marcbilodeau.com