If you want to know right now what your server has been doing When problems arise, every DBA wants to know what the database has been up to. If your best idea so far has been to parse the log files or load the CSV logs into another database, you might want to learn about a better way. With logging hooks, you can attach data sinks directly to the PostgreSQL server log stream and analyze logging events as they happen. Many useful applications arise this way: put log data into another PostgreSQL database for ad hoc querying store log data in Hadoop for analytics throw log data into a graphing system generate alerts directly from logging events I'll show you how to put these things together and use them in practice.