I’m a developer on software used in the property industry. We are busy revising system security etc. We are considering to write log files for certain high risk processes. What is the best way of writing logs? In my opinion I feel its maybe worth our while to write to log tables in the existing db instead of creating text file logs. I realise that this would contribute to the size of the db,but there are ways & means to archive the information if necessary. Another advantage is that reporting/Statistic/Search interfaces can much easier be implemented from a relational db structure than a text file.

Please give me your view on this as there might be important factors that I’m overlooking.