Sql-server – All in one query for tracking changes in sql server

Don't bother tracking audit data on a per-field basis. It's much easier to have an audit table with the same structure as the main table and timestamp and user information tracked on the table.

This architecture has a few advantages:

• You can easily create a view across the main table and audit table to show a complete history includint current versions.
• It is relatively simple to implement the audit triggers - in fact if you hae a large number of tables you can write a utility to generate them from the system data dictionary.
• The audit tables can be put on a separate disk to reduce the I/O load on the disk with the main tables.
• It's very easy to reconstruct an as-at version of the record, rather than having to apply a list of field-level changes in reverse.

Audit information should include at least: user who created/changed the record, date/time of the creation/change, nature of change (insert, update, delete). You may want to use logical deletion (i.e. a 'Deleted' flag) if you have the option of doing so. Otherwise you need to capture the user and date/time from the session and put these on the deletion record, probably along with the last state of the record. If this is not available from the connection (often the case on N-tier apps where the user is not being impersonated at the database level) then you need to find some other way to get it.

If you have a license for enterprise edition, upgrade to 5.5 or 5.7 and use the audit log plugin.