While this is all good, very few places AFAIK actually process their HTTP server logs into a form that can be queried by SQL. Google does it, certainly, but many smaller shops don't. Has this been your experience as well?
There are at least two tools that support directly querying log files with SQL:
* logparser -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logparser
* lnav -- https://lnav.org
lnav uses SQLite and provides quite a few extensions, so quite a lot is possible. The logs are exposed via virtual tables, so there is no separate import step.
In any case, do you have a write-up somewhere of how you use a columnar DBMS to slurp your server logs?
I like to store Apache & nginx logs as JSON so they can be parsed with tools like jq, and adding/removing fields doesn't break parsing.
From JSON it is also easy to pull them into PostgreSQL (at least) in jsonb format, or parse out key elements as their own regular table fields.
The strategies within could be applied to virtually any time-series data.