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Sawmill Newsletter July 29, 2011 |
Welcome to the Sawmill Newsletter!
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News
Sawmill 8.5.0 is now available. This is the final, production release of the new Sawmill 8.5 version, which is a major upgrade to Sawmill 8. It is also a free upgrade to Sawmill 8 (though your profiles and databases will need to be converted). You can download Sawmill 8.5.0 from http://sawmill.net/download.html . Please send your feedback about your experiences with Sawmill 8.5.
Sawmill 7 users can upgrade to Sawmill 8.5 for half of the license price; or if you have Premium Support, the upgrade is free. Major features of Sawmill 8 include support for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, real-time reporting, a completely redesigned web interface, better multi-processor and multi-core support, and role-based authentication control. Major new features of Sawmill 8.5 are described in this newsletter, below.
Get The Most Out Of Sawmill With Professional Services
Looking to get more out of your statistics from Sawmill? Running short on time, but need the information now to make critical business decisions? Our Professional Service Experts are available for just this situation and many others. We will assist in the initial installation of Sawmill using best practices; work with you to integrate and configure Sawmill to generate reports in the shortest possible time. We will tailor Sawmill to your environment, create a customized solution, be sensitive to your requirements and stay focused on what your business needs are. We will show you areas of Sawmill you may not even be aware of, demonstrating these methods will provide you with many streamlined methods to get you the information more quickly. Often you'll find that Sawmill's deep analysis can even provide you with information you've been after but never knew how to reach, or possibly never realized was readily available in reports. Sawmill is an extremely powerful tool for your business, and most users only exercise a fraction of this power. That's where our experts really can make the difference. Our Sawmill experts have many years of experience with Sawmill and with a large cross section of devices and business sectors. Our promise is to very quickly come up with a cost effective solution that fits your business, and greatly expand your ROI with only a few hours of fee based Sawmill Professional Services. For more information, a quote, or to speak directly with a Professional services expert contact consulting@flowerfire.com.
What's New In Sawmill 8.5
For this Sawmill Newsletter, we're skipping the usual Tips & Techniques section, to give a comprehensive overview of the new functionality in Sawmill 8.5.
Memory and Performance Improvements
The most noticeable change from Sawmill 8.1 to Sawmill 8.5 may be the improved performance and memory usage. Sawmill 8.5 has a completely new "under the hood" mechanism for accessing its files and databases, and as a result, it uses memory more efficiently. It adjusts its memory usage to the available system memory, so it won't exceed the available memory (as Sawmill 8.1 sometimes could, causing an error), and it won't use too little memory either (which could cause slower performance). New memory management settings in the Preferences allow you to tune Sawmill's memory usage, so it can use more if it's the only thing running on a dedicated system, or less if it has to play nice with a collection of other programs on the same system.
Sawmill 8.5 also improves performance by building all indices and cross-reference tables in a single pass over the main table, instead of requiring a separate pass for each. This can greatly reduce Sawmill's disk access during a database build, not only improving performance but also reducing wear on the disk, and improving system responsiveness.
The net result of these enhancements, and a slew of other performance optimizations, is a speed improvement of 50%-100% in most operations of Sawmill 8.5, compared to Sawmill 8.1.
Snapons / KPIs
Sawmill 8.5 adds a new feature called "Snapons." Snapons are extremely flexible, and provide a method of modifying a profile and its database according to instructions defined in a standard module. For instance, you might attach a "downloads" snapon to your profile, and it would immediately add a "downloads" field to all your reports, showing the number of downloads of a particular file from your site. Or you could attach a "bounce rate" snapon, and you would get table columns and graphs showing the bounce rate for your web site. Or you could attach a "concurrent connections" snapon, and your reports would then show the maximum number of concurrent connections or streams for each day, hour, etc. Most of these were possible in Sawmill 8.1, but required extensive and expert profile editing to implement. Snapons encapsulate this expert information, allowing you add advanced functions to a profile quickly and easily, without having to do manually all the low-level edits required to implement them. Snapons can also be detached at any time, and generally do not require the database to be rebuilt. Snapons can add new database fields, add new reports, add columns to existing reports, add database filters, and many other operations.
Snapons can be used to implement almost any Key Performance Indicator (KPI). A number of snapons for common KPIs are included with Sawmill 8.5.0; more will be added in the future. It is also possible to create your own snapons; or our experts can create one for you, to implement your favorite KPI.
The entire Sessions analysis in 8.5 is now implemented as a snapon; among other benefits, this allows session information to be removed from a profile in a single operation; that was an extremely time-consuming and error-prone operation in 8.1 (involving hundreds of manual profile edits). It is also possible to have multiple session analyses in a single profile, by attaching more than one instance of the Sessions snapon, for instance by user and by IP address, which was not possible in 8.1. And like most snapons and database filters, the database does not need to be rebuilt when attaching or detaching Sessions; database filters act directly on the database, and do not need the log data to be re-parsed, and database fields required by snapons are added or removed dynamically from the database as necessary.
Database Filters
Sawmill 8.5 introduces a new type of filter, Database Filters, which operate directly on the main table of the database, after data has been parsed and imported from the logs. These are usually used in conjunction with Snapons: a snapon will often add a database field, and add a database filter to populate it, and a report field to report it.
Database Filters are similar to Log Filters, but instead of operating during log parsing (like Log Filters), they operate after the database is built, after all log data has been processed, even after reports have been viewed. There are several important advantages to this. First, database filters can request a particular ordering of the data, so for instance they can request that the data be fed to them in chronological order, or group by IP address, or grouped by page views only. This allows types of analysis which were nearly impossible in Sawmill 8.1, including global concurrent-connection analysis. Secondly, database filters can affect the database without requiring a rebuild of the log data. The log data isn't needed at all, to run a database filter against the database, so new functionality can be added to an existing database without the time-consuming process of re-parsing, as would be required by a log filter.
Improved Profile Navigation/Selection
Sawmill 8 features a greatly improved Profile menu, which replaces the Config menu of earlier versions. This menu, which is available from both configuration pages and Reports, shows all available sections of the profile in a unified pull-down menu. Database Build and Update, Reports, Database Info, and all Config pages are available immediately from this menu.
The Admin menu link has also been enhanced, to allow immediate access to all pages of Admin, from any page of the interface (including Reports, Admin pages, and Config pages), without having to go through the Profiles list.
Customizable Overview
The Overview report in Sawmill 8.5 has been enhanced to allow unwanted fields to be hidden. In Sawmill 8.1, the Overview always showed all database fields; in Sawmill 8.5, it now shows report fields instead (which also provide additional flexibility in formatting over database fields), and only those that are needed.
New Profile Wizard Enhancements
The New Profile Wizard has been enhanced in several ways, most significantly through the addition of a dynamic search field in the Log Format selection page. With support for more than 850 log formats, and more being added all the time, it could be difficult to find the particular format in Sawmill 8.1 if it didn't auto detect; in 8.5, you can type a part of the name, and as you type, it will show you a list of all matching plug-ins.
Many Other Improvements to the User Interface
We've been working to improve all aspects of the Sawmill user interface. Most of these changes are small, but they add up to a significant overall enhancement of the user experience.
One particular improvement involves the way we combine and cache our JavaScript and style sheet files behind the scenes; this greatly reduces the number of requests the browser has to send, which makes the whole web interface snappier.
Email Reset of Forgotten Passwords
Sawmill 8.5 now includes a Password Reset functionality, which allows a user to reset their own password, if they've forgotten it, though a link emailed to that user's address. If your Sawmill installation has a lot of users, this automates one of your most frequent support tasks, saving you time.
Professional Services
This newsletter describes many new features of Sawmill 8.5, including the new Snapons feature. If you need assistance with configuring Sawmill 8.5, for instance creating a custom snapon for campaign analysis or other KPI analysis, our Sawmill Experts can help. Contact sales@sawmill.net for more information.
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