Audit Trails and Change Tracking
Tracking who changed what and when — triggers, temporal tables, and building a complete change history.
It's Wednesday afternoon and your biggest customer calls. Their billing address changed overnight and they didn't do it. Was it a bug? A support agent? A migration script? A hacker? You open the database, and the address is just... different. No record of what it was before. No record of who changed it. No record of when.
Without an audit trail, your database is a snapshot — it tells you what the data is, not how it got there. Every UPDATE overwrites the previous value. Every DELETE erases a record from existence. The history of your data is lost with every write.
Audit trails fix this by recording every change: who made it, when they made it, what the old value was, and what the new value is. This isn't just for compliance (though it's required in many regulated industries) — it'
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