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    <p>In my experience, when developers try to make their system really "dynamic" they're actually trying to code for problems that they haven't thought of yet. That's usually a bad path to take. Is it really so much extra work for a module to include two tables instead of one?</p> <p>In every case where I've seen the pattern (or anti-pattern?) of trying to make a generic "does everything" table it's fallen flat on its face. RDBMSs work best with well-defined problem areas. If the module has a need to keep history then the module should add a history table to go with the table itself. This also has a huge advantage in that down the road you're likely to want to keep different types of information in the history depending on the table or module for which the history is being kept. If you have a generic history table that becomes much more difficult.</p> <p>Now, if you want to simply capture the last user to update or insert a particular item (table row) and that could be in multiple tables then you could use a pattern of inheritance where you have a parent table and multiple children tables. For example:</p> <pre><code>CREATE TABLE Audited_Items ( id INT NOT NULL IDENTITY, CONSTRAINT PK_Audited_Items PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id) ) CREATE TABLE Articles ( id INT NOT NULL, [Article specific columns] CONSTRAINT PK_Articles PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), CONSTRAINT FK_Articles_Audited_Items FOREIGN KEY (id) REFERENCES Audited_Items (id) ) CREATE TABLE Media ( id INT NOT NULL, [Media specific columns] CONSTRAINT PK_Media PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), CONSTRAINT FK_Media_Audited_Items FOREIGN KEY (id) REFERENCES Audited_Items (id) ) CREATE TABLE Audit_Trail ( audited_item_id INT NOT NULL, audit_datetime DATETIME NOT NULL, user_id INT NOT NULL, [audit columns] CONSTRAINT PK_Audit_Trail PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (audited_item_id, audit_datetime), CONSTRAINT FK_Audit_Trail_Audited_Items FOREIGN KEY (audited_item_id) REFERENCES Audited_Items (id) ) </code></pre>
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    1. COThank you for your detailed response Tom. I do very much like this design and am going to consider it in my further research.
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    2. COClosing the loop on the question, thank you Tom H., your method appears to satisfy my design quite well. Hopefully few changes will need to be made down the road.
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