I was recently introduced to log4net by
Ed Kisinger of EqSquared.com and absolutely
love the project. I’ve previously used to Logging Application Block inside Enterprise
Manager for my logging, and would again if I was using the rest of EntLib, but log4net
fills the wonderful point where you may not want to take on all of EntLib and still
have excellent logging.
log4net abstracts the actually logging on messages from the
location that a log will be stored. As such it is easy to change from file logging,
to UDP network logging to Database logging, all without touching the code which actually
logs. Fantastic idea! The Appender model, as they call this, includes
many excellent Appenders right out of the box.
In particular, I wanted to use to AdoNetAppender to log my messages
to a database. Easy enough, the simple example included in the AdoNetAppender
documentation logs the most basic of information. But as you dig deeper into
what information log4net can store, you begin to realize how oversimplified
this structure really is.
It would be a reasonable thing to say that I can sometimes be
a bit of a perfectionist. As such I spent this morning creating a database structure
capable of holding all of the log4net information, properly normalized to the third
normal form. If you would like to be able to store any information available
from log4net when logging to a database, then feel free to take this structure and
adapt it to your needs.
The only personalized piece of this database at the moment is
the inclusion of a column for storing a property called InstanceId. As I work
with BizTalk on a regular basis, and love Scott
Colestock’s BizTalk Deployment Framework, I included a column for the Orchestration
instance id which his Serializable
log4net extension includes.
Download
Version 1.0 of log4net Database