Question

I have a profile page (less than 10k users) and I need to track every change and update that is made through out the application, by the users. Whether a user updates the profile picture or adds an extra space in a “comments” field, I need to store the previous data.
In short: I need to store everything.

Is there some sort of “tracking-history-and-changes-in-sql-server” software or do I have to implement it myself?

If I have to implement it myself I can think of three ways to do it:

1. I keep everything in the same table
   but I add a key column that
   specifies which row is active
   and which is old.

2. I add a new table called history
   where I store the column name that had the
   change, when it was changed and what
   the old data was.

3. I add a history table for each table
   in the database. It looks the same
   but only keep track of each tables
   history.

Has anyone had a similar problem and how did you solve it?

This was built using mvc 4 and it’s a
normal website.

EDIT
I’m mostly interested in existing solutions/software, but If there are none I would have to do it myself.
Has anyone used SQL Data Compare?

Answer 1

Where I worked last everything had to be logged fully. (working with goverment organisations). We never updated or deleted data.

What you would do is have a start date and an end date on each row. To do an update you would update the old data to have an enddate then insert a new row in the table. To do a delete you would put an enddate on the row with a null enddate. We also had an “updated by” column to put the userid