statistics

Because I am on the internet, and because the apps I use offer statistics, I figure I would share some of them, feel free to do the same, if you feel the urge.

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In part 1 I explained how to build middleware and an associated model to capture page accesses, and tie them to a user session. Now that we have all this useful info logged we need to do something with it, like, display it. Unfortunately Django doesn't have a facility for using GROUP BY with mysql, so you have two major choices (there are more but we can ignore them): implement a custom request in a custom Manager (see snippet and snippet, or tagged snippets), or exploit a mysql view and model it in Django. Now for me I prefer the latter because it means my custom sql becomes a mysql customisation and as far as Django is concerned it is dealing with a normal table (but don't tell Django that it is read only), and thus the model code works, so subsequent queries and manipulations can exploit the ORM easily. My subjective and non-scientific experience is that using views is a lot more efficient/quick than using custom queries in the manager (it probably has to do with whatever optimisations exist with views, and the fact that you only fetch items when Django decides you need to fetch a row). So, how the hell do we do it?

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Last night I built some middleware/models for a django application to log visitor/user activity on the site. The intention is to be able to do better user tracking, and build more comprehensive statistics stored in the mysql db (obviously I am also logging everything with apache). The current set up still needs some periodical scripts to conflate data into statistics. I was thinking of doing a daily-weekly-monthly routine (i.e. once a day stats are conflated for yesterday's stats, and once a week they are turned into weekly stats, and once a month they are minimised into a monthly overview.

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