Queryable Logging with Blacklite

I've published a logging appender called Blacklite that writes logging events to SQLite databases. It has good throughput and low latency, and comes with archivers that can delete old entries, roll over databases, and compress log entries using dictionary compression; compression that looks for common elements across small messages and extracts it into a common dictionary.

So that's the sales pitch. Now let's do the fun question – how and why did it get here?

I started off this blog post by writing out the requirements for a forensic logger as if I had total knowledge of what the goal was. But that's not what happened. The real story is messy, discovering the requirements piecemeal, and involves lots of backtracking over several months. I think it's more interesting and human to talk about.