A Comparative Analysis of ASCII and XML Logging Systems

This research compares XML and ASCII based event logging systems in terms of their storage and processing efficiency. XML has been an emerging technology, even for security. Therefore, it is researched as a logging system with the mitigation of its verbosity. Each system consists of source content, the network transmission, database storage, and querying which are all studied as individual parts. The ASCII logging system consists of the text file as source, FTP as transport, and a relational database system for storage and querying. The XML system has the XML files and XML files in binary form using Efficient XML Interchange encoding, FTP as transport using both XML and binary XML, and an XML database for storage and querying. Further comparisons are made between the XML itself and binary XML, as well as binary XML to ASCII text when comparing file sizes and transmission efficiency. XML itself is a poor choice for hard drive and network transport time compared to ASCII. However, in a binary form, it uses less hard drive space and network resources. Because no XML databases support a binary XML, it is loaded without any optimization. The ASCII loads into the relational database with less time than XML into its database. However, querying each database, neither outperforms the other as one query results in shorter time for one, and another query results in a shorter time for the other. Therefore, XML and/or its binary form, is a viable candidate for use as a comprehensive logging system.