Classic Hits, Part 3
Hit counters are the newest Web craze; which ones will rise to the top of the charts?
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Intersé Market Focus 2.0 (now Microsoft Market Analyst -- Ed.)
The high price of Intersé's Market Focus--ranging from $3,495 to $6,995--makes it of interest only to well-heeled companies. But even for those businesses, the program might not be worth the money.
Market Focus makes it mindlessly simple to gather up log files of all types across your enterprise. Analyzing that data, however, is a different story. The basic package has you export the log file into a run-time version of Microsoft Access, which is a fine personal DBMS, but it just isn't cut out for 100 MB worth of log files. Sure, it works, but even on a 100 MHz Pentium with 32 MB of RAM, you'll go into a slow burn as the hours tick by. Report generation is even slower. The advanced version--the one that costs nearly seven grand--will let you send the data to the SQL Server, but that's it.
Market Focus can translate data into Microsoft Word, which is of marginal usefulness, and to several of the comma-delimited data formats, which means that its information can be used by almost any DBMS. It also can use Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to communicate directly with OLE-aware programs like FoxPro and Excel. And if Market Focus already supports OLE and Microsoft DBMS products, future versions will almost certainly support ActiveX, though no such plans have been announced.
Can you wait that long? And at this price tag, do you want to? My answer is no. Market Focus is too slow and too limited for major Web sites, and too expensive for anything short of a five-star site.
Hit List Professional
Hit List Professional is a new, feisty product for Windows users. The program has several good features, not the least of which is that it's designed from the ground up to be useful to both marketers and Webmasters. I'm describing Version 1.0 here, but 1.1, expected just after we go to press, is promised to be faster and even more user-friendly.
(June 1997 update: they're up to 3.5, and we're working on an update to this review! -- Ed.)
Hit List enables you to work with ODBC databases if, like Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), the server itself supports ODBC. It reads not only IIS logs, but also CLF, ECLF, O'Reilly WebSite, and Netscape server logs.
[Move on to the next part of the article]
Web Developer® Site Feedback
Web Developer®
Copyright © 2000 internet.com Corporation. All rights reserved.
Database Journal: The Knowledge Center for Database Professionals
