Question

I want to maintain a column which will store that how many times a row has been modified.
So whenever the row has been updated I want to increase the column value.
I think I have to use trigger for that.But I am looking for an alternative solution.

Answer 1

IMHO trigger is the way to go, but if you sure that you control all your updates, then you can do as simple as this:

UPDATE mytable 
   SET somefield='newvalue', 
       update_count = update_count+1 
   WHERE id=n