Change Tracking Overview

Change Tracking Overview
SQL Server 2008 R2
Other Versions

SQL Server 2008 introduces change tracking, a lightweight solution that provides an efficient change tracking mechanism for applications. Typically, to enable applications to query for changes to data in a database and access information that is related to the changes, application developers had to implement custom change tracking mechanisms. Creating these mechanisms usually involved a lot of work and frequently involved using a combination of triggers, timestamp columns, new tables to store tracking information, and custom cleanup processes.

Different types of applications have different requirements for how much information they need about the changes. Applications can use change tracking to answer the following questions about the changes that have been made to a user table:

What rows have changed for a user table?

Only the fact that a row has changed is required, not how many times the row has changed or the values of any intermediate changes.

The latest data can be obtained directly from the table that is being tracked.

Has a row changed?

The fact that a row has changed and information about the change must be available and recorded at the time that the change was made in the same transaction.

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