Jeff Moden (10/30/2010)
First, I whole-heartedly agree with the principle of storing the same AuditDate when adding a "group" of rows for the very reason stated. To wit, my question would be, why would you add a group of rows one row at a time instead of loading them as a complete set with a single insert?
I certainly would load rows into a single table as a group, but even those insertions must be done through individual calls to the RAP insertion procedure. So even though they are queued and streamed, they are still done with individual stored procedure calls. Even if they were all inserted with a single statement, it is not clear that a "datetime" performed for each row would produce an identical value in each row.
Then of course there is the fact that most writes to the database do not involve merely a single table. If I write a parent and child record together and I expect to retreive them together, they'd better have the same AuditDate on them.