Question

I’m working on an application that is used to store payment information. We currently have a Transaction Audit table that works thusly:

Anytime a field changes in any table under audit we write an audit row that contains: 1 the table name, the field name, the old value, the new value and the timestamp. One insert takes place per field changed per row being updated.

I’ve always avoided Triggers in SQL Server since they’re hard to document and can make troubleshooting more difficult as well, but is this a good use case for a trigger?

Currently the application determines all audit rows that need to be added on its own and sends hundreds of thousands of audit row INSERT statements to the server at times. This is really slow and not really maintainable for us.

Answer 1

Take a look at Change Data Capture if you are running Enterprise edition. It provides the DML audit trail you’re looking for without the overhead associated with triggers or custom user/timestamp logging.