Question

I want to implement history functionality in my application, but I want to skip
creating history data table for every business object data table.

I was thinking about creating one history data table, that contain one identity column and an XML column with changed data as follow

ID: int
XML: Data
Name: data table name

Is this approach implemented by someone or do you see any constraints about this architecture?

Answer 1

I have used a modified version of this article – Adding simple trigger-based auditing to your SQL Server database – for years now.

It uses the old INFORMATION_SCHEMA views since it relies on the column position which isn’t available in any of the newer DMVs (e.g. sys.tables, sys.columns). Other than that it flies and works like a charm.

If performance becomes a problem – and this is rare – you can consider using Service Broker to implement asynchronous triggers for writing to the history table.